It retained this longer title and motto in all subsequent editions. In the editions 1807 to 1820, it was placed by itself at the end of the poems, and formed their natural conclusion and climax. In the editions 1827 and 1832, it was inappropriately put amongst “Epitaphs and Elegiac Poems.” The evident mistake of placing it amongst these seems to have suggested to Wordsworth, in 1836, its having a place by itself,—which he gave it then and retained in the subsequent editions of 1842 and 1849,—when it closed the series of minor poems in Volume V., and preceded the Excursion in Volume VI. The same arrangement was adopted in the double-columned single volume edition of 1845.
Mr. Aubrey de Vere has urged me to take it out of its chronological place, and let it conclude the whole series of Wordsworth’s poems, as the greatest, and that to which all others lead up. Mr. De Vere’s wish is based on conversations which he had with the poet himself.
The Ode, Intimations of Immortality, was written at intervals, between the years 1803 and 1806; and it was subjected to frequent and careful revision. No poem of Wordsworth’s bears more evident traces in its structure at once of inspiration and elaboration; of original flight of thought and afflatus on the one hand, and on the other of careful sculpture and fastidious choice of phrase. But it is remarkable that there are very few changes of text in the successive editions. Most of the alterations were made before 1815, and the omission of some feeble lines which originally stood in stanza viii. in the editions of 1807 and 1815, was a great advantage in disencumbering the poem. The main revision and elaboration of this Ode, however—an elaboration which suggests the passage of the glacier ice over the rocks of White Moss Common, where the poem was murmured out stanza by stanza—was all finished before it first saw the light in 1807. In form it is irregular and original. And perhaps the most remarkable thing in its structure, is the frequent change of the keynote, and the skill and delicacy with which the transitions are made. “The feet throughout are iambic. The lines vary in length from the Alexandrine to the line with two accents. There is a constant ebb and flow in the full tide of song, but scarce two waves are alike.” (Hawes Turner, Selections from Wordsworth.)
In the “notes” to the Selections just referred to on Immortality, there is an excellent commentary on this Ode, almost every line of which is worthy of minute analysis and study. Some of the following are suggested by Mr. Turner’s notes.
The morning breeze blowing from the fields that were dark during the hours of sleep.
Compare Browning’s May and Death—
French “Pensée.” “Pansies, that’s for thoughts.” Ophelia in Hamlet.
This thought Wordsworth owed, consciously or unconsciously, to Plato. Though he tells us in the Fenwick note that he did not mean to inculcate the belief, there is no doubt that he clung to the notion of a life pre-existing the present, on grounds similar to those on which he believed in a life to come. But there are some differences in the way in which the idea commended itself to Plato and to Wordsworth. The stress was laid by Wordsworth on the effect of terrestrial life in putting the higher faculties to sleep, and making us “forget the glories we have known.” Plato, on the other hand, looked upon the mingled experiences of mundane life as inducing a gradual but slow remembrance (ἀνάμνεσις) of the past. Compare Tennyson’s Two Voices, and Wordsworth’s sonnet, beginning—
i.e. with the dramatis personæ.
There is an admirable parallel illustration of Wordsworth’s use of this figure (describing one sense in terms of another), in the lines in Airey-Force Valley—
Compare with this, the lines in the fourth book of The Excursion, beginning—
The outward sensible universe, visible and tangible, seeming to fall away from us, as unreal, to vanish in unsubstantially. See the explanation of this youthful experience in the Fenwick note. That confession of his boyish days at Hawkshead, “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” (by which he explains those—
suggests a similar experience and confession of Cardinal Newman’s in his Apologia (see p. 67).
The late Rev. Robert Perceval Graves, of Windermere, and afterwards of Dublin, wrote to me in 1850:—“I remember Mr. Wordsworth saying, that at a particular stage of his mental progress, he used to be frequently so rapt into an unreal transcendental world of ideas that the external world seemed no longer to exist in relation to him, and he had to reconvince himself of its existence by clasping a tree, or something that happened to be near him. I could not help connecting this fact with that obscure passage in his great Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, in which he speaks of—
Professor Bonamy Price further confirms the explanation which Wordsworth gave of the passage, in a letter written to me in 1881, giving an account of a conversation he had with the poet, as follows:—
“Oxford, April 21, 1881.
“My dear Sir,—You will be glad, I am sure, to receive an interpretation, which chance enabled me to obtain from Wordsworth himself of a passage in the immortal Ode on Immortality.…
“It happened one day that the poet, my wife, and I were taking a walk together by the side of Rydal Water. We were then by the sycamores under Nab Scar. The aged poet was in a most genial mood, and it suddenly occurred to me that I might, without unwarrantable presumption, seize the golden opportunity thus offered, and ask him to explain these mysterious words. So I addressed him with an apology, and begged him to explain, what my own feeble mother-wit was unable to unravel, and for which I had in vain sought the assistance of others, what were those ‘fallings from us, vanishings,’ for which, above all other things, he gave God thanks. The venerable old man raised his aged form erect; he was walking in the middle, and passed across me to a five-barred gate in the wall which bounded the road on the side of the lake. He clenched the top bar firmly with his right hand, pushed strongly against it, and then uttered these ever-memorable words: ‘There was a time in my life when I had to push against something that resisted, to be sure that there was anything outside of me. I was sure of my own mind; everything else fell away, and vanished into thought.’ Thought, he was sure of; matter for him, at the moment, was an unreality—nothing but a thought. Such natural spontaneous idealism has probably never been felt by any other man.
“Bonamy Price.”
This, however, was not an experience peculiar to Wordsworth, as Professor Price imagined—and its value would be much lessened if it had been so—but was one to which (as the poet said to Miss Fenwick) “every one, if he would look back, could bear testimony.”
The following is from S.T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (chap. xxii. p. 29, edition 1817)—
“To the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante addresses to one of his own Canzoni—
But the Ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet cannot be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever meant or taught it.
The following parallel passages from The Excursion, The Prelude, Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Keble’s Praelectiones de Poeticae vi Medica (p. 788, Prael. xxxix.), and the Silex Scintillans of Henry Vaughan, are quoted, in an interesting note to the Ode on Immortality, in Professor Henry Reed’s American edition of the Poems (1851).
III
“ … There was never yet the child of any promise (so far as the theoretic faculties are concerned) but awaked to the sense of beauty with the first gleam of reason; and I suppose there are few, among those who love Nature otherwise than by profession and at second-hand, who look not back to their youngest and least learned days as those of the most intense, superstitious, insatiable, and beatific perception of her splendours. And the bitter decline of this glorious feeling, though many note it not, partly owing to the cares and weight of manhood, which leave them not the time nor the liberty to look for their lost treasure, and partly to the human and divine affections which are appointed to take its place, yet have formed the subject, not indeed of lamentation, but of holy thankfulness for the witness it bears to the immortal origin and end of our nature, to one whose authority is almost without appeal in all questions relating to the influence of external things upon the pure human soul.
And if it were possible for us to recollect all the unaccountable and happy instincts of the careless time, and to reason upon them with the maturer judgment, we might arrive at more right results than either the philosophy or the sophisticated practice of art has yet attained. But we love the perceptions before we are capable of methodising or comparing them.” (Ruskin’s Modern Painters, vol. ii. p. 36, part iii. ch. v. sec. i.)
“ … Etenim qui velit acutius indagare causas propensae in antiqua saecula voluntatis, mirum ni conjectura incidat aliquando in commentum illud Pythagorae, docentis, animarum nostrarum non tum fieri initium, cum in hoc mundo nascimur; immo ex ignota quadam regione venire eas, in sua quamque corpora; neque tam penitus Lethaeo potu imbui, quin permanet quasi quidam anteactae aetatis sapor; hunc autem excitari identidem, et nescio quo sensu percipi, tacito quidem illo et obscuro, sed percipi tamen. Atque hac ferme sententia extat summi hac memoria Poetae nobilissimum carmen; nempe non aliam ob causam tangi pueritiae recordationem exquisita illa ac pervagata dulcedine, quam propter debilem quendam prioris aevi Deique propioris sensum.
Quamvis autem hanc opinionem vix ferat divinae philosophiae ratio, fatemur tamen eam eatenus ad verum accedere, quo sanctum aliquod et grave tribuit memoriae et caritati puerilium annorum. Nosmet certe infantes novimus quam prope tetigerit Divina benignitas; quis porro scit, an omnis illa temporis anteacti dulcedo habeat quandam significationem Illius Praesentiae?” (Keble, Praelectiones de Poeticae vi Medica, p. 788, Prael. xxxix.)
“Corruption
Mr. Reed also quotes a passage from Vaughan’s poem Childehood; but a more apposite passage may be found in The Retreate, in Silex Scintillans.
The extent of Wordsworth’s debt to Vaughan has been discussed a good deal. There was no copy of the Silex Scintillans in the Rydal Mount sale-catalogue. I believe that he had read The Retreate, and forgotten it more completely perhaps than Coleridge forgot Sir John Davies’ Orchestra, a Poem on Dancing, when he wrote The Ancient Mariner.
The following may be added from The Friend (the edition of 1818), vol. i. p. 183:—“To find no contradiction in the union of old and new to contemplate the Ancient of Days with feelings as fresh as if they then sprang forth at his own fiat, this characterizes the minds that feel the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it! To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day, for perhaps 40 years, had rendered familiar,
This is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent.”—Ed.
[310] Compare the Atman of the Vedanta Philosophy.—Ed.
[311] See vol. ii. p. 292.—Ed.
[312] 1820.
[313] Compare The Idle Shepherd Boys, ll. 28-30 (vol. ii. p. 138).—Ed.
[314] 1807.
[315] 1836.
The text of 1832 returns to that of 1807.
[316] 1836.
[318] 1807.
[319] Compare, in Bacon’s Essay Of Youth and Age, “A certaine Rabbine upon the Text, Your Young Men shall see visions, and your Old Men shall dream dreames, inferreth that Young Men are admitted nearer to God than Old, because Vision is a clearer Revelation than a Dreame.”
See Professor Max Müller’s note to his translation of the Upanishads (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xv. p. 164), beginning “Drivudagomga uses a curious argument in support of the existence of another world.”—Ed.
[320] 1807.
[321] 1815.
[322] See, in Daniel’s Musophilus, the introductory sonnet to Fulke Greville, l. 1.—Ed.
[323] 1807.
[324] This line is not in the editions of 1807 and 1815.
[325] The editions of 1807 and 1815 have, after “put by”:
The subsequent omission of these lines was due to Coleridge’s disapproval of them, expressed in Biographia Literaria.—Ed.
[326] 1815.
[327] 1807.
[328] Compare The Excursion, book iv. ll. 205, 206—
Ed.
[329] 1827.
[330] 1815.
[331] 1815.
[332] 1836.
[333] Professor Dowden writes of this line: “It is a sunset reflection, natural to one who has ‘kept watch o’er man’s mortality’: the day is closing, as human lives have closed; the sun went forth out of his chamber as a strong man to run a race, and now the race is over and the palm has been won: all things have their hour of fulfilment.” (See vol. v. p. 365, of his edition of Wordsworth’s Poems.)—Ed.
[334] Compare the introduction to the first canto of Marmion—
Ed.
[335] Compare Wither’s The Shepherds Hunting, the fourth eclogue, ll. 368-380.—Ed.
[336] The text of Pindar, as given by S.T.C., is corrected in the above quotation.—Ed.
POEMS
BY
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
AND BY
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
NOT INCLUDED IN THE EDITION OF 1849-50
[European Magazine, 1787, vol. xi. p. 302.]
S.T.C. addressed some lines to Wordsworth under the name Axiologus. The following is a sample, sent to me by the late Mr. Dykes Campbell, Ad Vilmum Axiologum.—Ed.[338]
AD VILMUM AXIOLOGUM
[337] The only justification for republishing this sonnet is that it is the earliest authoritative record of Wordsworth’s attempts in Verse. It is a much more authentic one than the Extract from the conclusion of a Poem, composed in anticipation of leaving School, or than the lines Written in very early Youth, and beginning
Wordsworth dated the former of these poems 1786, but I do not believe that he wrote that poem, and still less that he wrote “Calm is all nature,” etc., as we now have it, in that year. Doubtless he wrote verses on these two subjects; but the best evidence against the notion that the text, as we now have it, was written in 1786, is this 1787 sonnet on Miss Maria Williams. It is not only dated authoritatively, but it was published in 1787; and therefore serves (as nothing else can until we come to 1793) as evidence in regard to the development of his poetic power. The translation of Francis Wrangham’s lines—which he called The Birth of Love—in 1795, is further evidence in the same direction. No doubt there were many poor poetic utterances by Wordsworth later in life—failures in his manhood, as dismal as the “Walford Tragedy” was in his youth—but I think that the Lines written in very early Youth, and the Extract from the Poem composed in anticipation of leaving School, were rehandled by him, and the text greatly improved before they were first published. The late Mr. J. Dykes Campbell wrote to me in 1892: “Poets tell dreadful fibs about their early verses—as witness S.T.C. who declared he wrote The Advent of Love at fifteen! I know he didn’t, and am going to print one or two of his prize school verses of that age, which I have found in his own fifteen-year-old fist.”—Ed.
[338] I should add, in a footnote, that I have no knowledge of the source whence Mr. Campbell derived this; but I am sure that it must have reached him from an authentic one.—Ed.
In the “Autobiographical Memoranda”—dictated at Rydal Mount in 1847—Wordsworth said, “The first verses which I wrote were a task imposed by my master: the subject The Summer Vacation, and of my own accord I added others upon Return to School. There was nothing remarkable in either poem; but I was called upon, among other scholars, to write verses upon the completion of the second century from the foundation of the school in 1585, by Archbishop Sandys. These verses were much admired, far more than they deserved, for they were but a tame imitation of Pope’s versification, and a little in his style. This exercise, however, put it into my head to compose verses from the impulse of my own mind; and I wrote, while yet a schoolboy, a long poem running upon my own adventures, and the scenery of the county in which I was brought up.”
The Summer Vacation, and the Return to School, were destroyed by Wordsworth.—Ed.