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ANITA M. JONES
ODE ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY
A CRITICAL STUDY " N o w th e in t e r e s t a n d im p o rta n c e of th e m a t te r w e re h e r e of th e h ig h e s t, h is in s ig h t w a s a t its v e r y d e e p e s t ."
This comment by Gerard Manley Hopkins 1 on W ordworth's
Ode on intimations of immortality is an extreme instance of what
seems to have been a frequent critical attitude and provides
a useful starting-point for a fresh consideration. The poem has
received much adulation, some questioning, but little close cri
tical analysis. One of Wordworth's most impressive poems, it
occupies a crucial position in his work, but it is questionable
whether it is depth of insight that gives it its power.
Any discussion of "insight" inevitably involves some consi
deration of the relation of belief to poetry, a problem that is par
ticularly relevant in the case of Wordsworth. The bulk of his
work seems to express a very individual and deeply held view
of existence. This does not mean that the value of his, or of any,
poetry depends on the truth or conviction of the beliefs expres
sed: as I. A. Richards has pointed out,
"... m any ... of the statem ents ni poetry are there as a means to the manipulation and expression of feelings and attitudes, not as contributions to any body of doctrine of any type w hatever.” 2
Although the kind of belief poetry demands is "emotional" rather
than "intellectual" 3, nevertheless, Richards remarks,
"intellectual exploration of the internal coherence of the poem"
is
"not only perm issible but necessary in the reading of much p o e try ." 4 1 Quoted by Humphrey House, A ll in Due Time, 1958, p. 45. 2 Practical Criticism, 1930, p. 186. 3 cl. ibid., p. 274, ff. 4 ibid., p. 277.
22 ANITA M. JONES
Such an exploration is of particular interest in the case of
the Immortality Ode, for the ideas expressed in the poem seem
to be at variance, not only with each other, but also with the
main line of thought in the bulk of W ordsworth's best work,
Thus it is necessary first of all to give some account of the ma
ture W ordsworth's characteristic insight and orientate the Ode
in the body of his work as a whole. A significant parallel in the
work of Henry Vaughan further throws into relief the individual
character of the Ode and the change of attitude that is beginning
to appear in W ordsworth's work. The Ode can then be analysed
in detail, with reference to this wider context, and its peculiar
poetic effects can be established.
In the Ode W ordsworth laments the loss of the '’visionary
gleam" which, he tells us, belongs to childhood. The child inhab
its a world irradiated by the light of heaven which it has only
just left, but this light is gradually lost as the child grows up and
earth weans it away from the heavenly existence it led before
birth.
This conception of two worlds, the earthly and the divine,
and of the gradual progression of man away from his source
of insight and sense of glory in the divine world, is quite alien
to the burthen of W ordsworth's major work. For the characteristic
Wordsworth, This green earth comprises the whole of existence,
mortal and immortal:
the very world which is the world Of all of us, the place in which, in the end, W e find our happiness, or not at all. (The Prelude, X, 126) «
The individual mind is exquisitely fitted to the external world:
"and how exquisitely, too- ... The external world is fitted to the mind.” 7 6 This is not alw ays recognised: cf., for example, Graham Hough, The Romantic Poets, 1953: "...he has lost none of his pow er of dealing w ith the facts of experience. The deveiopem ent described is as true to his own h eart as the least elaborated passages of the Prelude..." (p. 57) 8 All quotations from The Prelude are from the 1805 text, ed. by E. de Selincourt, 1933. 7 63 ff. in the extract from The Recluse printed as Prospectus to The Excursion, 1814.
24 ANITA M. JONES
"delight T hat fails not in the external universe." (X III, 118)
Thus, in this idea of pre-existence and its consequences, as
presented in the Ode, Wordsworth is rejecting much of what is
most significant in his assertions elsewhere.8 Indeed, as if recog
nising this discrepancy, he himself tells us in his note that the
•idea of a pre-natal life is not to be taken simply as a statement
of his own belief:
"A rchim edes said that he could move the world if he had a point w hereon to rest his machine. W ho has not felt the same aspirations as regards the world of his own mind? H aving to wield some of its elem ents w hen I was impelled to w rite this Poem on the Im m ortality of the Soul, I took hold of the notion of pre-existence as having sufficient foundation in hum anity for authorizing me to make for my purpose the best use of it I could as a Poet." (I. F.)
W ordsworth is using the idea as an image to express a par
ticular state of his own mind 9. But it is not clear in the poem that
this is simply an image: although the idea of pre-existence is at
variance with his usual way of thinking, Wordsworth seems in
the poem to be offering it as a statement of belief, and the very
fact that he needed to clarify matters in his note suggests some
confusion in the thought of the poem itself. Likewise with the
visionary experience he is describing:
"I w as often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own im m aterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality ..." (I. F.)
The poem itself gives little idea of the subtlety of this ex
perience. The "visionary gleam" of the first few stanzas is vague
and unsubstantial as compared with its revelation in, for instance,
8 This has been pointed out by Basil W illey in his brief but valuable dis cussion of the poem in The Eighteenth Century Background, 1946, pp. 284—7. 9 The significance of the fact th at W ordsw orth needed to choose an external image has been pointed out by John Jones in his excellent study of W ordsw orth, The Egotistical Sublime, 1954: "...W ordsw orth had always intended, in entire seriousness, to »move the world« through his poetry; and he has once felt able... to do so from within. But in the Im m ortality Ode he is preparing himself for the defeat of his im aginative monism: the answ er to the world m ust be outside the w orld.” (p. 167).
ODE ON INTIM ATIONS OF IMMORTALITY 25
The Prelude. The childhood world of the Ode is paradisal, almost
unreal in its splendour, "the glory and the freshness of a dream”
This perpetual radiance is of a different quality from the light
which embodies Wordsworth's vision in The Prelude. The cha
racteristic light image of The Prelude is the flash:
"Gleams, like the flashing of a shield" (I, 614) "w hen the light of sense Goes out in flashes th at have shewn to us The invisible w orld” (V I, 534)
The world of the Ode is "apparelled in celestial light", irradiated
from without; the world of The Prelude is at least partly illumined
by the mind of the beholder:
"an auxiliar light Came from my mind which on the setting sun Bestow'd new splendor" (II, 387) "from thyself it is th a t thou m ust give, Else never can receive" (X I, 333)
In the Ode vision gradually "fades into the light of common day”,
while in the bulk of W ordsworth's work it is precisely the „simple
produce of the common day" 10 which is the object of the poet's
transforming vision.
However, although this poignantly nostalgic evocation of the
paradisal light of childhood dissociates the Ode from what is basic
in Wordsworth's mature work, it does link the ipoem closely to
the work of the seventeenth century poet, Henry Vaughan, and,
in particular, to his poem, The Retreat 11:
H appy those early days, w hen 1 Shin'd in my Angel-infancy! Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught
10 Prospectus to The Excursion, 55. 11 The sim ilarity betw een the two poems has sometimes been briefly mentioned by critics, e. g. Douglas Bush, A M inority Report, in W ordsworth (Centenary Studies presented at Cornell and Princeton U niversities), ed. G. Dunklin, 1951 (pp. 16— 17). However, the w hole question of W orsw orth's relation to 17th century poetry seems to rem ain a largely unexplored and possibly fruitful field of investigation.
ODE ON INTIM ATIONS OF IMMORTALITY 27
it flows". Vaughan's child has a "glorious train”, W ordsworth's
comes "trailing clouds of glory”. Vaughan calls the earth,
"this place Appointed for my second race.”
Wordsworth comments,
"A nother race hath been, and other palms are won."
The use of the word "race" as a kind of pun, suggesting both
a running race and a race of people, is characteristic of seven
teenth century "wit", but is a linguistic feature most uncharacter
istic of Wordsworth; the possibility oif Vaughan's influence thus
seems especially plausible here.
These similarities seem too close to be mere coincidence. The
sense of sin in The Retreat and the hope of returning to heaven
are elements absent from W ordsworth's poem; but it is significant
that at this time Wordsworth seems to have found himself
heavily under the influence of so essentially a Christian poet
as Henry Vaughan. This division of existence into two worlds,
divine and earthly, and the representation of the early vision
as a sustained radiance, is a sign of W ordsworth's eventual
adoption of a more orthodoxly Christian faith. This sign is
glimpsed now and then even during the period of his most as
sured and characteristic work. For example, in To the cuckoo,
written in 1802, the year in which the Ode was begun, the "vi
sionary hours" and "golden time" of childhood are evoked in
much the same terminology. The "unsubstantial faery place"
evoked by the cuckoo's song might well be the childhood world
of the Ode.
By 1806, in Yes, it was the mountain Echo, the divided worlds
are made explicit; man hears "voices of two different natures",
"Echoes from beyond the grave";
"Listen, ponder, hold them dear; For of God, — of God they are.”
By the time The Excursion appeared in 1814 this had hardened
into a whole system of thought. The "imperial palace" of the
Ode, so odd an image in the early Wordsworth, develops, in the
vision with which Book II concludes, into "a mighty city":
28 ANITA M. JONES
"Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold, W ith alabaster domes, and silver spires, And blazing terrace upon terrace.” (II, 839)
Composed upon an evening of extraordinary beauty and splen
dour, develops the theme still further: after describing the "beamy
radiance" and "gem-like hues" of sunset, Wordsworth declares,
"From worlds not quickened by the sun A portion of the gift is won; An interm ingling of H eaven's pomp is spread On ground which British shepherds tread."
W ordsworth refers to the Ode himself in a note to this poem,-
one can see in it all the elements that seemed new in the earlier
poem here colouring the poet's whole attitude and softened,
almost sentimentalised.
This sense of divided worlds and falsification of childhood
vision into a conscious and constinuous state, which in fact it
was not, is an almost inevitable development of Wordsworth's
peculiar kind of vision. The Prelude reveals him as perpetually
poised between light and darkness; paradoxically, just as his
mind has reached maturity and the full import of his youthful
experience is revealed to him, he is simultaneously conscious
that his vision is beginning to fail. It is a flickering vision and
the poet is kept in a continual state of striving:
"The days gone by Come back upon me from the daw n almost Of life: the hiding-places of my power Seem open; I approach, and then they close; I see by glimpses now; w hen age comes on, M ay scarcely see at all.” (The Prelude, XI, 334)
The "visionary gleam", momentary flash as it is, is only fully
realised long afterwards:
"doom 'd to sleep Until m aturer seasons call'd them forth To im pregnate and to elevate the mind." (The Prelude, I, 622)
The clearest analysis of this experience is perhaps the passage
in Book VI of The Prelude describing the crossing of the Alps:
"Imagination! lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my Song Like an unfather'd vapour; here that Power,
30 A NITA M. JONES
That w hatsoever point they gain, they still H ave som ething to pursue." (11, 334)
During his period of most intense creative activity these mo
mentary glimpses of "an obscure sense Of possible sublimity"
were sufficient to sustain him, but gradually Wordsworth felt
the need for a more settled, systematised inner life:
"M e this uncharted freedom tires; I feel the w eight of chance-desires: My hopes no more m ust change their name, I long for a repose that ever is the same.” (O de to D uty)
The calm existence which he foresees in the Ode to Duty (1805)
as a result of a dedication to duty has something of the sunlit
quality of the childhood world of the Immortality Ode:
"Serene will be our days and bright, And happy will our nature be, W hen love is an unerring light, And joy its own security."
In The Excursion his acceptance of duty as part of a schematised
Christian view of existence is more or less complete. In Book IV,
in lines which, as he tells us in a footnote, refer explicitly to the
Ode, he remarks:
"Alas! the endowm ent of immortal power Is m atched unequally w ith custom, time, And dom ineering faculties, of sense In all” (IV , 205)
but spiritual victory is sure for him who yields "submission to
the law Of conscience". The Ode, begun in 1802 but not finished
until at least 1804, reveals him in the midst of his dilemma.
Confused and incoherent as it sometimes is in its thought, it
seems to embody the accumulated doubts, fears and misgivings
that were creeping upon Wordsworth at the height of his po
wers.1 4
In fact the Ode is principally an emotional statement, more
so than, with its apparently intellectual statements, we would at
first sight expect it to be. It is an expression of the emotional
14 For a detailed account of the changing direction of W ordsw orth's mind, ci. John Jones, The Egotistical Sublime, 1957, especially chs. 3—4 (pp. I l l —192).
ODE ON INTIM ATIONS OF IMMORTALITY 31
conflict caused by the poet's fluctuating vision, not, as is The
Prelude, an attempted analysis or concrete illustration of this
vision. The very verse form, the irregular ode structure, is un
characteristic of Wordsworth, with his customary sobriety; it is
essentially a rhetorical poem, demanding a strong emotional
response from the reader u. The dramatic structure of the opening
stanzas, the question and answer device, is employed to evoke
the maximum emotional effect. The first two stanzas, with their
elegiac rhetorical questions, lament the passing away of glory;
in stanza III the poet reasserts for a moment his sense of joy,
but in stanza IV, even as he raches an ecstatic climax, there
is a sense of strain in his repeated
"I feel — I feel it all’
and later,
"I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!"
At this point the tension snaps, and the verse is brilliantly
modulated back into the poignantly nostalgic key of the opening:
— "But there's a Tree of many, one A single Field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of som ething th a t is gone: The Pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat: W hither is fled the visionary gleam? W here is it now, the glory and the dream?”
This emblematic selection of a particular tree, field, flower, is part
of a large rhetorical gesture1 6. The landscape of the Ode has not
the actuality and immediacy of W ordsworth's usual conception
of nature. At least one line recaptures his characteristic ima
ginative force:
"The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep."
But the cataracts spring out of an almost Spenserian pastoral
world, where
15 Matthew Arnold seems half to perceive this without appreciating its significance: he found "the great Ode not w holly free from som ething declam atory" (Preface to The Poems of W ordsworth, 1879, reprinted in Essays in Criticism, 2nd series, ed. S. R. Littlewood, 1956, p. 94). 16 John Jones has commented on the change in Wordsworth's treatment of flowers in his later poetry. "A lready, in the Im m ortality Ode, the »pansy at my feet« is com pletely formal, introduced with the barest of gestures... interesting only for its relevance to the hum an predicam ent” (op. cit., p. 181).
ODE O N INTIM ATIONS OF IMMORTALITY 33
cluster of metaphors, verge on exaggeration, but they are just
saved from ridicule by the tremendous emotional drive that sus
tains the verse. The impact of the passage upon us is not a con
viction of the justice of W ordsworth's statement, but the emo
tional impact of the poet's bitter sense of loss, striving after
childhood experience, unable to recreate it, groping for words
to define the child's vision, but only able to pour adulation
upon it.1*
In stanza IX the poem takes a fresh turn. All is not lost,
Wordsworth says; but the part of childhood experience which
he describes as of permanent value is something new in the
poem:
"those obstinate questionings Of sense and outw ard things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a C reature Moving about in worlds not realised, High instincts before which our m ortal N ature Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised."
This sense of grim disturbance is quite different from the para-
disal serenity which permeates the childhood world at the be
ginning of the Ode; but it at once recalls The Prelude, especially
episodes like that of the stolen boat (I, 372—427). For a moment
the characteristic Wordsworth seems to emerge: he no longer
tries to classify his experiences, he simply rejoices in them,
"be they what they may":
"But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, W hich, be they w hat they may, A re y et the fountain light of all our day, A re yet a m aster light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence: ..."
These lines, with their soaring confidence and assertion of the
lasting validity of childhood experience, are the climax of the
18 For an ardent appreciation of this passage and its philosophy c/. G. W il son Knight (op. cif., pp. 42—48), whose view is diam etrically opposed to that of Coleridge, and who sees the "rest of the ode" as "the structure for this the central tow ering height, or heart" (p. 43).
3 — R o czn ik i H u m a n isty c z n e
34 ANITA M. JONES
poem: here Wordsworth seems suddenly in command again.
But just as Suddenly the tone drops again in the next stanza:
"W hat though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; W e will grieve not, rather find S trength in w hat rem ains behind; ..."
The things that are left behind seem a poor consolation, and the
vagueness of W ordsworth's language robs it of conviction. What
exactly is "the philosophic mind"? And what are "the soothing
thoughts that spring Out of human suffering"? We are at once
reminded of the "still, sad music" of Lines composed above Tin-
tein Abbey:
"the still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample pow er To chasten and subdue."
These lines, in their context, epitomize W ordsworth's attitude
to suffering, the sympathetic but detached observation of the
man who, like the W anderer in The Excursion,
"could afford to suffer W ith those whom he saw suffer."
W e can give meaning to the "philosophic mind" and "soothing
thoughts" by relating them to the body of Wordsworth's work;
he reaches similar moral conclusions about suffering and en
durance elsewhere:
"There is a com fort in the strength of love; Twill m ake a thing endurable, w hich else W ould overset the brain, or break the heart.” (M ichael) "»God«, said I, »be my help and stay secure; I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!«" (R esolution and Independence) "...what we feel of sorrow or despair From ru in and from change, and all the grief That passing shows of Being leave behind, A ppeared an idle dream " (T he Ruined Cottage)
But these observations take conviction from the dramatic demon
stration of their validity in the preceding narratives: all Words
worth's convincing moral reflections are the immediate outcome
36 ANITA M. JONES
his own joy reaches its height in an ecstatic tranquillity that
transcends emotion, "that serene and blessed mood, dominated
by the" eye made quiet". The Ode, however, is a passionate ex
pression of doubt, conflict, heartbreak, and Wordsworth summons
all the resources of a rhetorical and dramatic style to evoke the
maximum emotional effect2 3. The bulk of his major work is an
expression of or the fruit of a particular kind of visionary ex
perience; the Ode is a very personal expression of the emotional
state of the personality behind the vision. To declare where
a poet's insight is deepest is perhaps in the last analysis a non-
literary judgment; but to agree with Hopkins' statement one
would have to deny the validity for Wordsworth of the central
tenets and inspiration of much of his greatest work. The Ode
in style and effect is unique in W ordsworth's work; it occupies
a pivotal position, looking before and after, eloquently crystall
ising the complexity and shifting direction of the poet's mind.
23 F. W. Bateson sees the poem as moving "because of the intensity of W ordsw orth's longing for the impossible" (W ordsworth, a Re-interpretation, 1954, p. 162). But Bateson distorts the true significance of the poem by seeing in it only W ordsw orth's desire to escape from particular personal problems besetting him at the time of composition.
