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The Themes of Immortality and Natural Piety in Wordsworth's Immortality Ode
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
There is a well-known note in A. C. Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry (pp. 139-141) which defines Wordsworth's “sense or consciousness of ‘immortality’” as “at once a consciousness that he … is potentially infinite, and a consciousness that ‘he’ belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an ‘active principle’ which is eternal, indivisible, and the ‘soul of all the worlds’.” Bradley quotes (very incorrectly) three passages from the Excursion as evidence that we “remain entirely outside Wordsworth's mind” if we read ‘immortality’ without extending the conception to mean infinity, and quotes again from the Prelude a passage to illustrate “the mind's infinity or immortality,” as if the concepts are not merely related but synonymous.
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References
1 Excursion rv.738-739, i.227-228, iv.1189. The last of these is simply misquoted, since the line reads “Far-stretching views into eternity,” not “far-stretching views of immortality,” as Bradley says. The second also is misquoted: “All things among the mountains breathed immortality” should read “All things, responsive to the writing, there / Breathed immortality”; and “the writing” is the Bible, “the volume that displays / The mystery, the life which cannot die,” as Wordsworth describes it just before (224-225). The lines immediately following the quotation associate immortality with infinity, with a remote verbal parallel (“the least of things / Seemed infinite”) to the conclusion of the Ode. The first quotation is correct, but the succeeding passage (745-762) clearly shows that Wordsworth means “immortality,” in spite of Bradley's doubts.
2 Wordsworth continually seems to approach and then to draw back from some such conclusion, like Coleridge, but I can think of only one explicit statement of a view like that of Bradley. In this passage Wordsworth speaks of “the one interior life”
—In which all beings live with god, themselves
Are god, Existing in the mighty whole,
As indistinguishable as the cloudless East
At noon is from the cloudless west, when all
The hemisphere is one cerulean blue.
But this striking passage is from an early MS. which was never used either for the Prelude or the Excursion and never printed at all until it appeared in the notes of the De Selincourt edition of the Prelude (1926), pp. 512-513. It was certainly not rejected because of its inferiority as poetry. Coleridge suspected that the line in the Ode “Haunted for ever by the Eternal mind” might conceal some such view and pointed out that even Spinoza or Behmen or the ancient pantheists would not “confound the part, as a part, with the whole, as the whole.” Lessing, he says, could not admit “the possibility of personality except in a finite Intellect.” Biographia Literaria (Oxford), ii, 112-113.
3 Wordsworth, Representative Poems, ed. Arthur Beatty (New York, 1937), p. 661.
4 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York, 1951), p. 132. The essay on Wordsworth's Ode in this volume is, after Garrod's, the fullest and most ambitious of all treatments of Wordsworth's great poem, but in this article I question some of its views as attempting to adapt Wordsworth to a 20th-century type of naturalism.
5 Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle (Oxford, 1927), ii, 838-839.
6 I suspect that this conclusive passage has been neglected merely because of the figure of speech, which Coleridge questioned in Biographia Literaria (Ch. xxii). He not only questioned “the propriety of making a ‘master brood o'er a slave,‘ or the day brood at all,” but he also criticized, rather unfairly, the whole apostrophe, including the four lines on the grave, which Wordsworth later omitted in deference to his criticism. In the Fenwick note on the Ode and in the first essay “Upon Epitaphs” (see below, pp. 865, 866) Wordsworth answered Coleridge by his comment on “We Are Seven.” The child is not unconscious of the “omnipresent Spirit,” as Coleridge argued; and the child's belief in immortality does “differ from that of his father and mother, or any other adult and instructed person.”
7 I accept most of the interpretation of N. P. Stallknecht in Strange Seas of Thought (Durham, 1945), p. 269, in which the close association of ‘immortality’ and ‘infinity’ is recognized, without the strange identification of the two concepts, as in Bradley's note. This little essay is, I think, of the highest value, but I should argue that it might well be extended by references to different conceptions of immortality at different ages, and specifically in childhood.
8 Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. De Selincourt (Oxford, 1937), ii. 619. Cf. Wordsworth's comment to Christopher Wordsworth on his childhood as represented in the Ode: “At that time I could not believe that I should he down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust.” Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851), ii, 476.
9 For very interesting similar experiences in Wordsworth's poetry, see the Prelude ii.348-352, and the beautiful little fragment from the Alfoxden notebook printed by De Selincourt and Darbishire, Wordsworth's Poetical Works (Oxford, 1940-49), v, 341 (Appendix B, ii.iv). All references to Wordsworth's poetry in this article are to the De Selincourt and Darbishire edition of the Poetical Works, or to the De Selincourt parallel-text edition of the Prelude (Oxford, 1926).
The intuition of preexistence in the Ode does not fall within the limits of this article, but I believe I should refer to the treatment of the subject in The Mind of a Poet by R. D. Havens, pp. 79, 306, and to The Prelude i.553-558 (with the important rejected version in De Selincourt's notes, p. 508), and v.507-522 (a brief version of the Ode).
10 Poetical Works, v, 445-446.
11 Here follows in MS. “L” (Poetical Works, IV, 283) a passage of two lines which shows that “those first affections, / Those shadowy recollections” are the same as “those obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things, / Fallings from us, vanishings.” Trilling suggests that “those first affections” may refer to the description of infancy in Prelude ii.232-265. But against this one may argue that in the rejected passage “Those first affections”
Throw off from us, or mitigate, the spell
Of that strong frame of sense in which we dwell.
They are, therefore, obstinate questionings of sense, not affections of infancy. N. P. Stallknecht discusses the thought of this passage most interestingly in Strange Seas of Thought, Appendix to Ch. v, but I should suggest that the “master light of all our seeing” is a repudiation of the concrete universe of which Stallknecht speaks. That universe dissolves and is absorbed into the mind. The experience is then an intimation of immortality, I think, but scarcely to be called “this sense of immortality” (Stallknecht, p. 270).
12 Poetical Works, iv, 284. Since all textual variants of the Ode are cited from the De Selincourt and Darbishire edition of the Poetical Works, no further specific references need be given.
13 The symbolism of sunset suggests that dawn also is symbolic, symbolic of “recollections of early childhood,” and probably even “intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood.”
14 Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), i, 58.
15 Prelude (1926), p. 592.
16 My italics.
17 Prelude, p. 594.
18 Excursion iv.1207-1238. This is a passage written some years before the Ode, in early 1798. For the early text, see De Selincourt and Darbishire, v, 400-401.
19 Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, ed. Nowell C. Smith, pp. 68-70. Or see the Friend of 1818, Second Section, Introduction.
20 Prelude, p. 559. My italics.
21 Poetical Works, v, 403, 39 (textual notes).
22 Poetical Works, ii, 428.