Wordsworth: A Centenary Tribute

BY Prof. K. SWAMINATHAN, M.A.

By nothing is England so great as by her poetry. And to us in India, by no English poet is this greatness so clearly manifested as William Wordsworth. Not only is he nearer to us in time than Shakespeare or Milton; not only was he more directly and passionately concerned with the moral problems that still trouble us, the problems of man and nature and society; but he is nearer to us in his whole temper, in his calm acceptance of spirit as well as matter, in his essential truth to the kindred points of Heaven and Home. The Harmony which he sought to establish between science and religion, between reason and imagination, between philosophy and poetry, is such as to satisfy our orthodox Vedantin. True, Wordsworth’s revelations were like flashes of lightning, precarious and uncontrolled and brief; they had none of the certainty, the steady strength and serene brilliance of the vision of our rishis, ancient and modern. And yet, since his poems are accurate records of real experiences of Kshana samadhi, they supply meaning and substance to those formulations which are jejune to us but which we repeat parrot-wise, already made answers to the eternal problems of man’s relations with nature and society. Wordsworth’s philosophy, such as it was, grew out of his personal and poetic experience. Poetry with him was not an art or a trade; it was a sadhana, a means of attaining jnana, knowledge of that truth which alone can make us free. We do not know Arithmetic when we have got by heart the correct answers at the end of our Arithmetic book. We know it only when painfully and patiently we master its principles and methods and apply them again and again to various situations, including those in our own lives. With Wordsworth we can share the excitement of the search for knowledge; and this is more thrilling and more nourishing to our souls than mere pride in an inherited and unused possession.

The Battle of Plassey in 1757, the Indian Mutinyin 1857 and the grant of Independence in 1947 are no doubt epoch-making events. But there are other incidents in the Indo-British connexion, not so loudly blazoned forth by historians, which are not less significant to a thoughtful mind. One such incident took place in 1881 in a class-room in the Scottish Churches College, Calcutta. Dr. William Hastie was explaining a passage from The Excursion:

“In such access of mind, in such high hour

Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not, in enjoyment it expired,
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices ofprayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power
That made him; it was blessedness and love!”

The students did not understand what all this meant. The professor said: “Such an experience is the result of purity of mind and concentration on some object. I have seen only one person who has experienced this state of mind and he is Ramakrishna Paramahansa of Dakshineswar. You can understand this if you go and see him.” One of the students in that class was Narendra Nath Datta, famous later as Swami Vivekananda. It was then that for the first time Naren heard of his future Master. Thus Wordsworth led Vivekananda to Ramakrishna and, through this meeting, won Margaret Noble and Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard and how many more to the service of the Perennial Philosopy.

In the nature mysticism of Wordsworth there is to us nothing strikingly original. Ramakrishna himself had his first trance when he saw a flight of white cranes against a ground of black clouds. Students of Zen Buddhism know how often the truth of the unity of Being has been revealed to the contemplative by the petal of a flower or the gesture of a hand, or the curve of a mountain.

If Wordsworth in humble reverence learnt lessons of wisdom from animals and children and peasants, and even from idiots and madmen, he was only re-living some moments in the life of our own poet-philosopher, Sankara, whose encounter with an untouchable and an idiot boy occasioned two of his most famous poems.

Even the statesmanship of Wordsworth, not merely in its final form as described by John Stuart Mill and Professor Dicey, but in the whole, long, troubled process of its growth, affords nothing more than a good example of honest, practical Varnasrama. The village-poet became a national, a European and a world poet; the poet of the Revolutionary era became a poet of permanent importance, precisely because he did not run away from, but accepted and made his own, the circumstances of his age and country. The timelessness of William Wordsworth was the direct product of his utter timeliness. He is universal because he was uniquely and intensely himself. Wordsworth is Everyman because he was himself alone, rooTed in his own place and time and circumstance, the product of his own peculiar predicament.

It has been well said that Wordsworth looked on men as trees walking. It may equally well be said that he looked on trees as men rooted to a spot. His skill lay in following Nature’s silent footsteps her own slow pace. He admired and almost worshipped men as they are in their daily life. He saw and sang the wonder of the commonplace :

“Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day......By words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures.”

Wordsworth experienced in common things and expressed in common words a joy in widest commonalty spread. A man among men, he discovered and revealed a secret which is well within the reach of average humanity.

The conjuror who raises before our bewildered eyes in ten short minutes a whole mango tree with leaves and flowers and fruit, corresponds to the usual poet, the dealer in epic and tragic stuff. Deliberately turning away from such sensationalism, Wordsworth leads us to the deeper mystery, the more wonderful miracle of a real tree growing.

This indeed is the supreme wisdom taught to Svetaketu by his father. The boy returned home after twelve years in his master’s house. His father said to him, “Svetaketu, my boy, you seem to have a great opinion of yourself. You think you are learned and you are proud. Have you acquired that knowledge whereby that which not heard is heard?

“What is that knowledge? My honoured masters knew this themselves. Explain this to me, father.”

“So be it, my child. Bring me a fruit from this banyan tree.”

“Here it is, father.”

“Break it.”

“It is broken, Sir.”

“What do you see in it?

“Very small seeds. Sir.”

“Break one of them, my son.”

“It is broken, Sir.”

“What do you see in it?”

“Nothing at all, Sir.”

“My son, from the very essence in the seed which you cannot see comes, in truth, this vast banyan tree. Believe me, my son, an invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit of the whole Universe. That is Reality. That is Atman Thou art That.”

Yes, the precious truth, the open secret, that Wordsworth discovered for himself, and that we Hindus take for granted as correct doctrine is the immanence of Spirit in Man and the Universe.

In dozens of passages Wordsworth declares the presence of an active Principle in every form of Being–in stars, clouds, flow trees, stones, rock, the waters, the air and the mind of man.

Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the soul of all the worlds.

Man and Nature belong to each other; man is not like the conjuror’s mango tree, a construction; he is like the real tree, a natural growth. But man is different from the rest of creation in one respect; namely that with the development of mind and reason, he can conceive himself as a separate entity and may, if he is careless or obstinately perverse, cut himself off from the living whole. The danger of self-will can only be overcome by the grateful memory of experienced Unity. Hence Wordsworth’s distrust of mind as the Enemy and his faith in memory as the Friend.

Wordsworth was lucky in his natural endowments–first, his fine awareness in childhood to sense impressions, and second, his natural, spontaneous idealism, his frequent trance-experiences in which spirit alone seemed to exist and matter to fall away and vanish. But this natural and healthy enjoyment of matter and spirit might have worn away, might have been corroded and consumed by Mind, might have sunk into customary staleness. This is exactly what happens in most of us. We too have known our godlike hours as natural beings in the strength of Nature; in our existence too we have had spots of time that possess a renovating virtue. We too have known mother-love, our first sight of sea or river or mountain, our first visit to a temple or church, our first transforming apprehension of “objects that endure”–not to mention our daily reunion with our inmost being in deep sleep. These precious moments, which most people forget and then deny, Wordsworth treasured in his memory and made much of. How did this happen? It happened because of the great crisis in his life, the conflict of loyalties in the early months of 1793, when he lost his faith in the senses and the affections and when he leaned on mere reason for support and found that it failed him utterly.

The Prelude, the story of his early life, has been called, rightly enough, the pattern of the English poetic mind. But the two adjectives–‘English’ and ‘poetic’–should, on careful consideration, be rejected as superfluous. The Prelude is, in reality the pattern of Mind, the story of the growth of every normal human mind from manas into buddhi, the process by which, in Keats’s words, “a world of pains and troubles schools an intelligence and makes it a soul.”

In the Old and New Testaments taken together, that is, in the story of the loss and gain of Paradise, as in the story of the Prodigal Son who left his father’s home and ate husk in a foreign land before returned to his loving father and his not-so-loving elder brother, we have the same archetypal pattern which we find repeated in European civilisation and in 18th century English poetry and in personal life of Wordsworth. This is the discovery of religion by recovery of a lost innocence. The passage from tamas to sattwa lies through rajas. The eleventh and twelfth books of The Prelude describe the moral conflict, the internal disruption, which corresponds to the loss of Paradise, to the self-imposed exile in a famine-stricken foreign land, the divorce of mind from the senses and the affections which is the precondition of religious conversion. As Middleton Murry puts it, “The spiritual progress of man is a progress through three phases, unconscious integration with nature, conscious separation from nature, and conscious reintegration with nature.” Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy in his ‘Transformation of Nature in Art’ describes these same phases as three kinds of knowledge; first, pratyaksha, direct immediate knowledge by experience, such as the child has of mother-love or objects of touch and taste; second, indirect knowledge, anumana or aparoksha, by inference, analysis, description, which is useful, no doubt, but partial and treacherous as leading to materialism, rationalism, cynicism and despair; and thirdly, the highest knowledge, aparoksha pratyaksha, the integral, intuitive knowledge of Spirit available to the contemplative saint. The prodigal son, we may be sure, had a keener appreciation of the parental roof than the stay-at-home elder brother. Wordsworth’s golden years, 1797 to 1807, were full of this recovered joy in common things. Bread is no doubt commonplace and not worth singing about, but to typhoid patient kept on strict diet for many weeks, the first bite of bread after his long illness is very heaven.

Nature Lyrics

The reflective Nature-lyrics in the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ of 1798 are classical in the distinctively new kind of poetry which Wordsworth created.¹ Here the language actually spoken by men is used, unfalteringly, for the simple and direct statement of the joy in Nature which the poet has now recovered after a terrible period of loss and privation and dismay.

These lyrics formed a pons asinorum which many worthy persons found it difficult to cross. The attack on books, the plea for passivness, the assertions that linnets have wisdom and that throstles can preach, that flowers enjoy the air they breathe, were treated as jokes or denounced as perverse. Viscount Morley declared: “No impulse from a vernal wood can teach us anything at all of moral evil and of good.”

“How readest thou?” asked Jesus of a lawyer who was out justify himself. How readest thou?–whether it is the law or poetry or Nature thou readest, how readest thou? is the question. Dost thou read humbly and seriously and with heart and will as well as intellect, or dost thou read cleverly and superciliously and for self-justification? Wordsworth reads Nature humbly and learns wisdom. Morley reads Wordsworth with the cleverness of a lawyer and learns nothing. If we are humble as we listen to Wordsworth, we shall learn that Man and Nature belong to each other as child and mother, tied together by gravitation and the filial bond of love. An inmate of this active universe, Man is in organic, living union with Nature; and when he is conscious of this union there is joy. This is true, immediate, integral knowledge. From books we get only a false, partial, indirect knowledge.

The Nature which the Sciences study is only the corpse in an Anatomy Laboratory. The Nature which the poet knows and enjoys is the living body, filled with spirit.

The intellect, refusing to wed, first murders and then proceeds to dissect Nature. But Man and Nature creatively unite to produce the living Reality which we call Sat-Chit-Ananda, Being - Awareness - Bliss.

To one who has enjoyed this bliss, goodness comes as naturally as leaves to a tree in spring. Coleridge and Morley and Lecky, in their strenuous pursuit of virtue, toiling and spinning, sowing and reaping, refuse to consider seriously lilies of the field and sparrows of the air and poets in their prime.

Tintern Abbey Lines

While many critics doubted the authenticity of these lyrics, both as poetry and as philosophy, the Tintern Abbey poem has been accepted as true autobiography and valid philosophy and has wrought a complete revolution in the general English attitude to Nature. That the English (or should one say the British) are a people with a compact, continuous and growing culture of their own is vividly illustrated by the success of the Tintern Abbey poem. The achievement of any Englishman becomes in time a general English achievement. The old, dirty water is thrown out before fresh clean water is received in the vessel. The 18th century attitude to Nature was destroyed once for all, and for the benefit of all Englishmen, by Wordsworth. It is sad to contrast the way in which many of us in this country retain not merely the Pre-Gandhian, but the Pre-Buddha and even the Pre-Upanishadic attitude to society.

The poem compares his mood in 1798 during his second visit to the Wye valley with his mood in 1793 during his first visit. In describing the different stages through which he passed in his enjoyment of Nature, he shows how his joy is rooted in memory. Avoiding all traditional symbols and images, this poem gives a clear, categorical and nonometaphorical account of numinous experience, and its value as evidence is enhanced by the poet’s unaffected sincerity and painstaking accuracy.

Lyrics

Wordsworth’s poems are usually accurate records of real occurrences. “The Solitary Reaper” was composed by Wordsworth during a walking tour in the Highlands of Scotland. A Highland girl reaping and singing by herself is seen by him and his sister. The song is in Gaelic and hence its meaning is not known to Wordsworth and his sister. The poem conveys in a thrilling manner the sense of loneliness and mystery. The Reaper, the one living creature there visible, dominates the landscape and her voice fills the valley. The stanza, about the nightingale and the cuckoo is a piece of pure magic. It pictures two other situations where a vast silence is broken by the music of some solitary voice. Arabia and Hebrides are musical words conveying suggestions of distance and mystery. In the next stanza the poet wonders what the Reaper’s song is about. He makes a series of guesses. How she sings the poet knows; she sings sadly. What she sings he does not know and can only guess. The lyric concludes with the statement of the Wordsworthian doctrine of memory. He carries the music in his memory long after he has ceased to hear it with his bodily ear.

The poem on the Daffodils (‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’) is of similar origin and leads to a similar conclusion. It is a paraphrase of an entry in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. Coleridge, who had begun to drift away from Wordsworth and who had lost his faith in the power of memory and in the objective reality of joy, cites the last stanza of the Daffodils poem as an example of Wordsworth’s mental bombast, that is, the use of thoughts and images too great for the object. He says, “bright colours in motion both make and leave the strongest impressions on the eye. A vivid image thus originated may become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such lines, as

They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude!

in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed ‘the bliss of solitude’?” Coleridge, like Viscount Morley, misunderstood Wordsworth because he failed to see that spiritual experience is something sui generis, and that one moment of pure joy is worth a multitude of virtuous actions.

The poem on The Glow-worm is a simple and satisfying statement of a real experience, in which there is an element of suspense and the final joy is doubled because it is shared with one he loves.

Sonnets

Our chief interest in Wordsworth’s sonnets lies in their exposition of the idea of national liberty and independence. Wordsworth’s patriotism was not of the sort which says, “My country, right or wrong,” Wordsworth discovered and expounded the correct doctrine of nationalism a whole generation before Mazzini, but important as this service was, it has done its work and is now only of historical interest, Shakespeare, Keats and other English poets have embroidered with their words and images the subject of sleep. It is not for its wit or fancy or phrasing, but rather for its directness and simplicity, that one goes to Wordsworth’s sonnet on Sleep, Man becomes one with Nature, man enjoys a sort of unconscious bliss, in sleep. As we say in this country, in sleep we, ordinary creatures, touch the depths of our real nature, the ground of being from which spring our million little islands of individuality and over which rolls the un-plumbed, salt, estranging sea of samsara or waking life. There is no difference between a Hitler and a Gandhi in their state of sleep.

This idea of sleep and its complete contrast to the state of wakefulness is applicable to a city as well as to an individual. In the sonnet on Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth compares London asleep to any rural valley, rock or hill. If we visit, say, our own Flower Bazaar in Madras at 3 A M, and contrast its state with its appearance of an evening, we shall realise the beauty of stillness and the structural strength of Wordsworth’s sonnet on Westminster Bridge.

The sonnet addressed to Milton is a fine example of what we may call social poetry as contrasted with Nature poetry. While man is a passive, though conscious and joyous, partner of Nature, his relation to society is more dynamic; and self-analysis and moral earnestness are in place in this kind of poetry. But Wordsworth’s humility invokes Milton for uttering this exhortation.

The last sonnet written in 1815 (‘Surprised by joy, impatient as the wind’) was suggested by the thought of his daughter Catherine whom he recollects long after her death, because the joy he now feels was of the same kind as the joy he shared with her years before,

The Prelude

The first Book of The Prelude describes the history of his childhood till the age of ten. He describes bird snaring, bird-nesting, an expedition in a stolen boat, skating and other outdoor activities. These activities led to an unconscious love of Nature. In childhood he accepted sun, moon and stars, the mountains and the lakes, as the ground of his glad animal movements. But later he loved them for their own sake.

When he took a bird which had been caught in a snare set by another boy, he felt the twinges of conscience. The mora1 law is only a part of the law of Nature. And Nature, not society, taught him virtue.

When he attempted to rob the raven’s nest of its eggs and clung to the steep crag, he experienced a sense of danger. In imagination he went through the experience of death and through mortality he put on immortality. Wordsworth came face to face with the immortal spirit within him in this awful moment, when he seemed for the last time to hear the wind and to watch the sky and clouds. This vivid, integral and immediate experience of a moral law and of life and death came to his memory after the crisis of 1793, and it was in the course of writing The Prelude that he discovered, in his childhood’s contact with Nature, the hiding places of his power.

From THE PRELUDE

Book I, Lines 301-339

Fair seed-time had my sou1, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear:
Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less
In that beloved Vale to which erelong
We were transplanted–there were we let loose
For sports of wider range. Ere I had told
Ten birthdays, when among the mountain slopes
Frost, and the breath of frosty wind, had snapped
The last autumnal crocus, ‘twas my joy–
With store of springes o’er my shoulder hung–
To range the open heights where woodcocks run
Along the smooth green turf. Through half the night,
Scudding away from snare to snare, I plied
That anxious visitation; moon and stars
Were shining o’er my head. I was alone,
And seemed to be a trouble to the peace
That dwelt among them. Sometimes it befell
In these night wanderings, that a strong desire
O’erpowered my better reason, and the bird
Which was the captive of another’s toil
Became my prey; and when the deed was done
I heard among the solitary hills
Law breathings coming after me and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

Nor less when spring had warmed the cultured Vale,
Moved we as plunderers where the mother-bird
Had in high places built her lodge; though mean
Our object and inglorious, yet the end
Was not ignoble. Oh! when I have hung
Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill sustained, and almost (so it seemed)
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears! the sky seemed not a sky
Of earth–and with what motion moved the clouds!

A passage from Book IV of The Prelude describes his dedication during the summer vacation of 1788. The sheer irrelevancy of prudence and morality and taking of thought is fully and finally proved by this passage.

Book IV, Lines 307-338

And yet, for chastisement of these regrets,
The memory of one particular hour
Doth here rise up against me. ‘Mid a throng
Of maids and youths, old men, and matrons staid,
A medley of all tempers, I had passed
The night in dancing, gaiety, and mirth,
With din of instruments and shuffling feet,
And glancing forms, and tapers glittering,
And unaimed prattle flying up and down;
Spirits upon the stretch, and here and there
Slight shocks of young love-liking interspersed,
Whose transient pleasure mounted to the head
And tingled through the veins. Ere we retired,
The cock had crowed, and now the eastern sky
Was kindling, not unseen, from humble copse
And open field, through which the pathway wound.
And homeward led my steps. Magnificent
The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as e’er I had beheld–in front
The sea lay laughing at a distance; near,
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn–
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,
And labourers going forth to till the fields.
Ah! need I say, dear Friend! that to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me, bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives.

By humility and a wise passiveness the poet had earned much more merit than he could have by strenuous pursuit of virtue. The spirit bloweth where and when it listeth.

The Immortality Ode

The great problem in Wordsworth is the contrast between the glorious outburst of song and philosophic utterance during the years 1797 to 1807, and the comparative dullness, staleness and conventionality of the poems composed in the last forty years of his life. There is no parallel in the world’s literature to this phenomenon of an inspired poet suddenly and completely losing his inspiration and yet going on writing masses of verse as if unconscious of the loss. The gods sell all things at a price, and the price which they demand from any given people for national solidarity, for a coherent culture, is the destruction of excessive originality. A good poet, says Garrod, is a man who throws bricks at windows and breaks them. Good and pious persons do not want their windows broken and the fresh air of heaven to get into their comfortable homes. Coleridge in his Biographia Lit.raria delivers a direct attack on Wordsworth’s admiration for children and, especially, his admiration for them on the ground of their not knowing the meaning of death. He singles out for special condemnation the sixth stanza of the Ode:

“Thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind,–
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!”

In the best manner of Samuel Johnson he exclaims,

“What does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that age a philosopher? In what sense does he read ‘the eternal deep’? In what sense is he declared to be ‘for ever haunted’ by the Supreme Being? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a mighty prophet, a blessed seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or by any form or modification of consciousness? In what sense can the magnificent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or a field of corn: or even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally unconscious of it as they.”

The whole difference between a child on the one hand and a bee, a dog, a field of corn, a ship or the wind on the other, is that the child grows into a man, the child is father of the man, the child retains, and builds upon, the memory of its first dim oneness with Nature, while the bee, the dog, the field of corn, remain forever a bee, a dog, a field of corn. Wordsworth knew and believed in the power of memory, of integral knowledge, in the evolution of human personality. Coleridge and most other Englishmen of his time were too arrogant to learn from children, tho’ of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. No wonder that Wordsworth lost heart, lost confidence in himself; and for the sake of conformity and because a good poem could no more be explained than a good joke, he wrote to please his public, not himself, and ceased to feel freshly or to remember truly.

In the first four stanzas of the Immortality Ode, Wordsworth raises the following question: - “When I was young I saw a visionary splendour not only in the rainbow, the rose, the moon and the sun but in every common sight, the meadow, grove and stream. Even now I see the splendour of extraordinary things like the rainbow, the rose, the moon and the sun. But the common objects have lost the glory and the freshness of a dream. What is this change due to? When in childhood I saw Heaven on earth, was it an illusion created by myself, or was the glory of earth seen by me in childhood the real truth and have I now lost the power of seeing the truth?” These same questions can be put in another way and indeed they are so put by Wordsworth in his Prelude, “What one is, why may not millions be?” For Wordsworth’s problem is the artist’s problem, it is the human problem, it is the central problem of all philosophy. Wordsworth in childhood saw with the eye of the mystic. For him then earth was crammed with Heaven and every common bush aflame with God. For him then the whole earth was full of God’s glory. Were the Upanishadic seers right, were Jesus and Laotse right, who saw the world as Wordsworth saw it in childhood? Or are we, ordinary people, right who see the world as Wordsworth saw it in his 32^nd year?

To this question he found no answer in 1802. But by 1805, when he had completed The Prelude, he found the answer and he states it triumphantly in the last seven stanzas of the Immortality Ode.

Wordsworth gratefully accepts the gifts of memory. Memory gives him the integral experience of childhood.

About the obstinate questionings referred to in the ninth stanza, Wordsworth says, “I was 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 immaterial 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.” He had to push against something that resisted, to be sure there was anything outside of him. He was sure of his own mind; everything else fell away, and vanished into thought.

In the last stanza Wordsworth reconciles himself to the loss of this direct experience of spirit by the thought that the grown up man has reflection, sympathy and social activities. Also, successive generations of children continue to be born and to enjoy this natural, spontaneous idealism.

At the time that he was completing the Immortality Ode, Wordsworth was engaged in expressing his sense of heroism in poems like the “Happy Warrior” and “Elegiac Stanzas”. These poems explain how the individual has to give up the quest for personal salvation and to merge himself, not in the rapt contemplation of Nature, but in the lives of other men.

(Paper read at the British Council, Madras, on the occasion of the Wordsworth Centenary, 30th August, 1950).

¹ “Lines written in early Spring,” “To My Sister,” “Expostulations and Reply,” “Tables Turned.”