The Intelligible Ode

Abstract

An auxiliar light Came from my mind, which on the setting sun Bestowed new splendour. William Wordsworth (1) THIS PAPER IS PREPARATORY TO A READING OF THE ODE. It tries to clarify the two principal ideas, or forms of experience, that Wordsworth believed made the Ode intelligible--the idea of immortality, and the relation of that idea to certain recollections of early childhood. The incomprehension and ridicule with which the Ode was first read moderated into a perception of its failure to reveal any recognizable form of immortality. How Wordsworth understood that term forms the first part of this paper, and attempts to reinstate his more complex insights, which later readings buried beneath simpler notions of physical resurrection and survival of the self. Unless we can look beyond those conventional ideas of immortality we will tend to ask the wrong questions of the poem, fail to see what Wordsworth was getting at, and so assert, mistakenly, I believe, that he could not substantiate his later subtitle, nor resolve the problems the poem raises. The second part considers what one reader called "the very mysterious and idiosyncratic experiences that lie at the heart of the poem," the remembered glories of childhood. But as the same reader adds, the difficulty is that although he "tries to do this with great precision and scrupulousness, both of argument and vocabulary... his articulation is ultimately unfathomable, because what he's attempting to express lies beyond the scope of words." (2) Eliot, in describing his own poetry as "a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling," (3) unwittingly typified the struggle Wordsworth himself acknowledged in such phrases as the "sad incompetence of human speech," and in the need to "make / Breathings for incommunicable powers" (1850 6.593; 1805.3.187-88). Both poets believe that the attempt to articulate the inarticulate is at the center of their work. That persistence suggests they believe that words can be used to convey what they cannot express precisely. Are critics not bound, therefore, in some way or other, to follow these "raids," to tie them together, to set them in a context that may render them a little more fathomable? Wordsworth is a poet particularly open to such a process, because he goes over similar ground in different ways, at different times, and in very different kinds of poems. If critical discourse abandons the attempt to follow him in this respect, then we may understand variously the political Wordsworth, or the elegiac Wordsworth, or the pastoral Wordsworth, and so on--in general the materialized Wordsworth--but not the kind of poet Wordsworth thought himself--the poet trying to apprehend experiences on the margins of conscious articulation, which he believed inform our being. And so we should avoid taking refuge in supposing Wordsworth's experience "unfathomable," or hiding behind the term "idiosyncratic." To put it another way, "Meanings beyond words are a fraught business because they cannot be shown (proven); those who do not hear can only be adjured to listen more closely." (4) To encourage a closer listening is part of the purpose of the second part of this paper, putting Wordsworth's experience in the context of a tradition originating in the seventeenth century, particularly the work of Thomas Traherne--who in his intellectual and spiritual sympathies was aligned to the Cambridge Platonists, a tradition resonant in Wordsworth's poetry. (5) PART I: INTIMATIONS THE EPIGRAPHS AND THE SUBTITLE: A SHORT RECEPTION HISTORY 1807--Paulo majora canamus With what is now known as "The Immortality..." or "The Intimations Ode," Wordsworth concluded the Poems in Two Volumes of 1807, and later, from 1815 onwards, his complete published works, bar The Excursion. In 1807, entitled only "ODE," it was further distinguished from all the other poems by means of a three word epigraph from Virgil, "Paulo majora canamus," or "Let us sing of things a little greater. …