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 Mutiny in 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:
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 of prayer 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 background 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 background 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
back 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.
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
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 32nd
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 back
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.”