“Tintern Abbey” and “Ode on Immortality”

“Tintern Abbey” and “Ode on Immortality”
In the Light of Samkhya Dialectic

Wordsworth’s entire poetics is a mighty emotional outflow a sensuous effusion – a mystic incantation on the beauty and sublimity of nature. Particularly his early and youthful poetry is almost a feasting on external manifestations. It is a period of sense-celebration. The poet surrenders wholly to sound and is deeply overpowered by the spell of colour.

There is hardly a hint on articulation about the indwelling spirit. Nevertheless an aimless groaping starts to identify it. Thus it is a total exposure to the frontal thrust of exterior beauty and enchantment. But as years pass by this emotional exuberance and poetic profusion mellows slowly into a serene spiritual maturity.

The poet outgrows his obsession with sense-perceptions and starts experiencing the limitless immensity of spirit and its intimations and subsequently achieves a harmonious integration between these two polarities. This dualism or dialectic bears a close correspondence to Indian Samkhya system of Prakriti and Purusha.

Prakriti is the evolving phenomenon limited by time and space while Purusha is the noumena of pure consciousness defying all causation.

            Tintern Abbey and Ode on Immortality mark a definite departure towards a higher gradation. These two poems perhaps stand out as definite achievements in evolution and enlargement of poet’s vision. A serious and sincere exploration starts to apprehend the presiding power behind the facade of world process:

A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

However we cannot totally rule out the poet’s precise reference to an innate spirit in his early poems. But in spite of an immature infatuation with sense-pleasures, there lurks a deep and unconscious urge to go beyond colour and sound. There is a feverish search for a totality. He fumbles for a fullness of experience and existence. A sense of insufficiency flows in and through the lines of those poems. There is a vague longing for a supra-sensuous experience. Its feeble rumblings are heard here and there. But Tintern Abbey and The Ode bring into a sharp focus the poet’s priorities and perspective. He matures into wide sympathies and is further metamorphosed from a passionate poet into a profound seer. The shift is from sense-gratification to spiritual illumination!

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing often times
The still, sad music ofhumanity.

For Wordsworth nature is no more a treasure-house of sense-­pleasures but on the contrary it is too deep for tears and conveys human suffering.
The poet experiences a flowering of new awareness. He comprehends a deeper turbulance beneath the sights add sounds of nature and perceives a pervasive principle in the process and flow of life. Now there is a deeper inspiration in the sleep of hills; a different intimation in the silence of the sky. A new message from the mountain springs and their haunting murmurs. Wordsworth’s poetry is a cyclic movement caught between process and reality. They establish a philosophical equivalence between Prakriti and Purusha. He finds no contradiction in their mutual interaction. They compliment each other for an eternal flow and progression of the universe.

Nature with all its beauty and variety is not self-sufficient; it has to evolve to merge with the ultimate reality. The mighty pattern of Prakriti includes the ebb and flow of world-process. It is the prime-mover behind the inexorable drama of creation and dissolution.

“The Prakriti creates and evolves only for the Purusha. When the Purusha comes to know it, the Prakriti vanishes. In this way it is better to rename Prakriti as ignorance or absence of knowledge. It cannot be absolute and independent”.¹

The whole world is a Parinaama or transformation of Prakriti. It is subtle and invisible caught in the flux and mutation of existence.

“... Prakriti.....It is called Jada; in the form of unlimited but always an active force it is called ‘Sakti’ while in the form of the unmanifested objects it is called ‘Avyakta’ or unexpressed”. ²

Prakriti represents a process and potentiality. Distortion and disturbance constitute its inner propelling. It includes human “Gunas”, as vagaries and variations.

Purusha is the unchanging reality or the eternal existence, the ideal and the ultimate destiny of Prakriti. The cosmic purusha is the eternal witness extending far beyond the bounds of the universe. Purushasukta says:

“Thousand_headed was the Purusha, thousand-eyed and thousand-legged. He, covering the earth on all sides, stretched himself beyond it by ten fingers length. All this Purusha along, whatever was and whatever shall be...one-fourth of Him. All beings are (but) three-fourths of Him in immortal in the highest heaven”. ³ (Rigveda, X, 90)

The process and reality constitute the two major strands in the poetic design of Wordsworth. Coexistence of these contraries imparts structural symmetry and conceptual harmony to Words­worth’s poetry.

            Tintern Abbey clearly reveals this dichotomy time and again. The whole poem thrives on a harmonious opposition of this physical and metaphysical principles. Thus sense and spirit are Prakriti and Purusha equivalents.

            The Ode on Immortality begins with a sad brooding on the poet’s sudden depletion of emotional inspiration:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

This poem is a clear pointer towards the poet’s changed perspective. He searches for the very roots of existence and finds out the essential divinity of man:

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;
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
from God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our Infancy!

The Ode is an open confession of the poet’s creative crisis. It gives us a glimpse into his inner turmoil. He delinks him­self from his former self. The previous emotional pull gives way to an expansion of consciousness.

His growth does not totally dismiss the validity of sense-­experience. But he treats it as a gradation in the upward advancement. In fact, sense and spirit are two different dimen­sions of totality.

Wordsworth’s concept of pre-natal existence is nothing but man’s unlimited absolute state of existence in its Purusha state.

The process of life with all its inner conflicts and con­traditions is contained in provisional and limited Prakriti. The meeting of Prakriti with Purusha is the union of individual soul with cosmic soul. Where illusion of Prakriti vanishes, the Purusha state alone remains as an infinite totality.

Notes

¹ R. N. Sarma; Indian Philosophy (Orient Longman, 1972). P. 193.
² Ibid: P. 189.
³ As quoted by Swami Krishnananda: Realisation of the Absolute (The Divine Life Society, 1972). P. 101.