This Life, This Death: Wordsworth’S Poetic Destiny

By John O'Meara

Looking ahead to the 250th anniversary of Wordsworths birth, this small book challenges fresh questions about where Wordsworth stood in his poetic production in the great years of creative ferment between 1798 and 1806. Numerous poems are covered from this period, but especially does this book re-think our traditional conception of the relationship between The Prelude and Intimations.

Wordsworth is separated from the visionary life he once knew by the interdictive effects of his obsession with The Recluse, the great philosophical poem he never finished. In the meantime he takes up with The Prelude but the essential Wordsworth remains the one who, in Intimations, turns his attention back, yearningly, to the visionary gleam. With The Prelude the epic poet comes through, but Wordsworth the visionary poet is lost, and it concerns him all the more now that he feels he faces death and a new darkness, the darkness of the grave, without the life that he once knew.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462018239

Book preview

This Life,

This Death

Wordsworth’s

Poetic

Destiny

JOHN O’MEARA

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

This Life, This Death

Wordsworth’s Poetic Destiny

Copyright © 2011 by John O’Meara.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-1821-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1822-2 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1823-9 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 06/01/2011

CONTENTS

A Note on References,

and Acknowledgments

Foreword

(i)

From The Recluse and The Prelude to Intimations

A Hopeful Beginning

(ii)

"The Things That I Have Seen

I Now Can See No More"

Wordsworth’s Lost Experience, and Hauntings

(iii)

Death and Dim Sadness

or Tristitia,

and Resolution

Life Against Death

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II

The Composition of The Prelude

in relation to Intimations:

A Working

Chronology

ENDNOTES

A Note on References,

and Acknowledgments

Wordsworth’s great epic poem, The Prelude, was only thus named (at the suggestion of his wife, Mary) posthumously, in 1850 when the poem came out for the first time. Until then, Wordsworth had spoken of his poem simply as The Poem to Coleridge. However, for convenience I have referred to the poem as The Prelude from its very inception in 1798. Over the years the poem assumed several forms: (what have come to be known as) the Two-Part Prelude of 1799, the Five-Book Prelude of 1804, the 1805 Prelude and the 1850 Prelude.

All quotations from The Prelude are from The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979). References are to the 1805 text—unless the context requires otherwise. Line numbers have been given only as it seemed necessary to facilitate reference for the reader. For comparative reference, indispensible also has been The Five-Book Prelude, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Without these highly useful editorial productions, work on the present book would have been greatly prolonged.

Foreword

Looking ahead to the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth’s birth, it seemed fitting to be coming forward, even if some time before that occasion, with this modest booklet on the great hopes and eventual destiny of one of our most highly revered poets. A culturally-alert reader will have noticed that the title quotes from William Butler Yeats.[1] There was no intention of implying a comparison between the two poets, ironic or otherwise, although the allusion could fruitfully open up a whole area of broad study on the way the themes of life and death have been lived out among our poets generally. I do not enter into any such comparative view in this study, but as an analogy between Yeats and Wordsworth is suggested, I do well to state here that the latter’s experience has little to do with the notion of having everything in hand and in perfect balance that Yeats’s phrase implies in its context. On the contrary, far too much was at stake for Wordsworth in the case of life and in the case of death for him to feel that they would not rather inevitably polarize and stand radically opposed to each other, so long as the forces of life remained fundamentally untapped and death a dark enigma. In many ways the following study dares to present itself as a necessary corrective to many of the easy views we have taken as to where this sublimely creative poet stood on this score. Inevitably, this intention, quite deliberately conceived, will be judged to arise from a personal view of the pattern of Wordsworth’s poetic production, and with this assessment I am ready to concur, so long as my readers will feel that the adventure they have taken with me was worthwhile and they have been enlivened by it.

JOM

For

Aline

who re-visited

Wordsworth

with me

on a long holiday spent in the Lake District

in the summer of 2010.

Who can forget that bend where the Derwent River meets Cockermouth Castle,

on a sombre day?

He had lost the path that should have kept leading more confidently and deeply inward . . .

—Seamus Heaney

 (i)

From The Recluse and The Prelude to Intimations

A Hopeful Beginning

Already months before his troubled sojourn in Germany in late 1798/early 1799, the idea had been sown in Wordsworth that he should commit to a long philosophical poem, tentatively entitled The Recluse—the sort of grand, representative project Coleridge saw as appropriate to him as the outstanding poet of his time and the successor to Shakespeare and to Milton. This idea for a poem, which was largely of Coleridge’s conception, constituted for Wordsworth at once a source of deep inspiration and a burdensome challenge the inhibiting effects of which in the long term do not fully begin to show (or at least they do not become fully understandable to us) until years later when he took up with his Prelude once again in 1804. During his time in Germany, Wordsworth responded to Coleridge’s challenge with what became initially the first part of the Two-Part Prelude, which Wordsworth saw as a complete form of the poem by the time he extended it to that length in late 1799. One can imagine how Wordsworth felt while in Germany, isolated as he was in a rather extreme way by impossibly cold weather which virtually confined his movements to a single room for weeks. He was again radically cut off from the world of Nature that had, not too lately, literally saved him in mind and soul.1 In the meantime, the idea of the philosophical poem that he especially ought to be getting down to write but which he had not yet attempted, must have pressed hard on him, greatly adding, by its own pressure, to the distress he was feeling in his unpromising isolation. In what must be regarded as among the most thrilling moments in English literature, Wordsworth then heroically set down the first few words of the forthcoming Prelude, beginning, disconcertingly, in mid-line:

Was it for this

That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved

To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song . . .

In his isolation Wordsworth had decided to call back for himself the Nature from which he was at this moment so distressingly separated and that had so profoundly determined his existence from the time he was born, as if to ask the fateful question: ‘Can this deep impasse into which I am plunged at this moment be any proper consequence for all that went into making me?’2 Thus began Wordsworth’s work on The Prelude, on which he was to lavish his attention for many years to come. He was at this moment fighting back, but instead of getting down to The Recluse, as was expected of him, suddenly he immersed in a long series of reminiscences that were soon to absorb him in and for themselves. He would throw an appearance of justification over his new project by maintaining that he was only going back into his life to see for himself how Nature had shaped him for the outstanding task Coleridge had assigned him. At the end of the first part, he claims that it has been his hope that, by returning to the sources of what went into making him, he might find the proper impetus to engage in the greater work assigned to him. But it is clear that Wordsworth feels pulled in two different directions: on the one hand, there is the call to write a great philosophical poem, The Recluse, as a work befitting him as the outstanding poet of his time, and on the other, there are his own poetic impulses that are driving him to look back deep into his past for insights into all that his extraordinary life in Nature had bred in him as though these insights might be