March 31, 2005
Unconsoling Philosophy
What? You haven't read Wordsworth's Intimations Ode? Ah, you should. Then read the rest of this post, another sharing of a paper I recently wrote.
Dear philosophers, I get sad when I think. Is it the same with you? —Charles Simic, "A Letter"
The assumption made by many critics of Wordworth's "Intimations Ode" is that the poem expresses and provides consolation for the poet's loss of "the glory and the dream." Lionel Trilling demonstrates the poem's two answers to the question "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" and declares the second, more naturalistic answer, the development of the "philosophic mind," to be the true consolation. Helen Vendler takes issue with Trilling's assessment of the poem's structure, but not the interpretation that the development of a "philosophic mind" consoles its possessor for the loss of the glory of childhood. Numerous other critics of Wordworth's poem can be found who likewise accept this assumption about the poem. But just as the word "intimations" in the Ode's title suggests a failure to recover fully the sense of childhood immortality so too does the word suggest the ultimate failure of the consolation the poet explores in the poem. The "philosophic mind," a melancholy faculty, is for Wordsworth an insufficient recompense for what he has lost.
A profitable comparison may be made between Wordworth's Ode and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, another work that purports to provide the speaker with philosophic consolation for what has been lost. Lady Philosophy appears to Boethius in prison to bring him out of despair and bitterness through orderly, rational argument alone. If, in fact, Wordworth feels the "philosophic mind" to be a sufficient consolation for his loss, might we not expect a similarly rational argument? In part, the poem lacks such an argument because it is, after all, poetry. Whereas Boethius' work is largely prose interspersed with poetry (the poetry used only as a crutch until the prisoner's mind strengthens), Wordsworth speaks only in verse, a genre in which we rarely expect to find a philosophically-sound argument. Even so, the logical contradictions in the poem caused Coleridge much anxiety and led him to object strenuously to Wordworth's inconsistencies. Since we must assume that Wordsworth was fully aware of these contradictions (if he was not when composing, he was during revision) then we must also assume that he makes something other than a logical argument in the poem. Rather than an attempt to display the consoling powers of the "philosophic mind," the poem represents Wordsworth's mutable emotions when confronting his loss. As the Ode ostensibly extols the compensatory virtue of the mature mind, it seems odd that the poem consists almost entirely of emotional outpourings rather than sober philosophical musings.
The immediate objection to this characterization of the poem as more emotional than philosophical is to detail the many threads of philosophic thought woven throughout it. Wordsworth, however, rejects each of these threads in turn. As the first four stanzas of the poem question rather than answer, we may pass lightly over them with only a few comments. One section, though, in stanza 3 does require a closer look:
To me alone there came a thought of grief: A timely utterance gave that thought relief, And I again am strong: The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep; No more shall grief of mine the season wrong; I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng, The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep (22–28)
Rather than a feeling of grief, the poet experiences "a thought of grief," a phrase that will haunt the poem's final lines. The quoted lines acquire from the insistent end-stops a certainty and strength to match that which the poet acquires from the mysterious "timely utterance." The rhymes of "grief/relief" and "strong/wrong" separate the poet's emotions into distinct opposites, heightening the shift from grief to strength. Still, the rapid shift remains suspicious, leading us to conclude that rather than true "relief," the poet is here forcing himself to ignore and sublimate his emotions through a meditation on nature. The "cataracts," both waterfalls and occluded eyes, drown out the poet's impious grief. What "Echoes" does he hear? We assume they must be the sound of the cataracts, but the poet listens to the echoes only after his emphatic statement that he will no longer "the season wrong." Perhaps, then, the echoes are of his own words, shouted to quell his heart. The feeling that the poet here sublimates rather than cures his grief increases with the image of "the fields of sleep." Rather than confronting his emotions, he forces them back down, drowns them out with his own and nature's noises, and covers them with sleep. The return of Wordsworth's grief in the next stanza confirms that the "relief" from the "timely utterance" was ineffectual.
The fifth stanza, as the beginning of the answer to Wordsworth's question, provides the first example of unalloyed philosophic thought: the Platonic theory that all humans existed prior to birth as spirits living with the gods. Numerous critics have demonstrated how Wordsworth eventually rejects this idea in favor of other, less supernatural ones, but a focus on the thought content of the fifth stanza misses the more important emotional content. Wordsworth here does not accept or reject the Platonic theory of pre-existence. Instead, he employs the theory as a metaphor able to capture his loss of "the glory and the dream." No one chastises a poet for inconsistency when the poet uses one metaphor in one stanza only to drop it for another metaphor in the next. Wordsworth writes:
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 (58–65)
What better way to express the existential angst felt when pondering the lost mental and emotional states of childhood? The lines also hint at the development of a "philosophic mind" by using an image that attempts to philosophize that persistent sense of loss. A pre-existence among the gods easily substitutes for the child's oceanic feeling of unity with nature that "At length the Man perceives…die away, / And fade into the light of common day" (76–7). Likewise, there is a rational, but not an emotional contradiction between the child's depiction in stanzas seven and eight. Wordsworth's address to the imitative child as "Thou best Philosopher," (111) which so irritated Coleridge for its irrationality, complicates our understanding of what, precisely, comprises the "philosophic mind" with which Wordsworth invests such healing powers. If he considers the child, "Haunted for ever by the eternal mind," to be the best of philosophers, then we can only with difficulty continue to assert that the "philosophic mind" is a mature faculty distinct from callow consciousness despite Wordsworth's later assertion that the "years…bring the philosophic mind" (187).
Another apparent contradiction arises in the all-important ninth stanza. Rather than raising "The song of thanks and praise" for the simple joys and hopes of childhood, Wordsworth praises "those obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things, / Fallings from us, vanishings; / Blank misgivings of a Creature / Moving about in worlds not realised" (141–6). Given that a large portion of the poem has been a lament for the loss of "the glory and the dream" experienced in childhood, Wordsworth's praise for the sort of probing and questioning of the world that carves out a self separate from nature seems strange. Furthermore, Worthsworth then shifts his praise to "those first affections, / Those shadowy recollections, / Which…Are yet a master light of all our seeing" (149–153). The repeated occurrence of logical contradictions in a poet as philosophical as Wordsworth strongly implies that he intends in the "Intimations Ode" to express emotions more than philosophy. His odd praise of the very process by which he has lost "the glory and the dream" further suggests an attempt, much like that in the poem's earlier stanzas, to convince himself of things which he does not truly feel. By praising the early stages of the development of the "philosophic mind," Wordsworth constructs a persona that desperately wishes to view that mind as compensation for what has been lost—a persona Wordsworth would like to fully inhabit, but cannot.
The last stanza, far from evincing a peaceful resignation, still bears the traces of the poet's desire to be yet again one with nature:
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born Day Is lovely yet; The Clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. (193–200)
Like his earlier suspicious protestations, the poet again claims to appreciate "even more" the nature with which he was one as a child. The words "lovely" and "yet" recall the second stanza in which the Rose is lovely; yet "there hath past away a glory from the earth" (18). The echo of the second stanza, set apart in a short, indented line amid a stanza of otherwise uniform line lengths, tempts us to read the line not just as "the new-born Day is yet lovely," but also as "the new-born Day is lovely. Yet…" The line conveys the poet's resignation to seeing a beauty that will forever remain external to himself. Similarly, the next several lines may be easily read in two competing ways. The first interpretation, that the eye which gives a "sober colouring" to the clouds is the poet's, fits well in the Romantic tradition of the pathetic fallacy as well as with the poem's emotional tone. The "eye" here also recalls the description of the child in the eighth stanza as an "Eye among the blind" (112). The second reading, however, carries a trace of the poet's attempt to merge himself with nature once again. As anyone who has seen a sunset knows, the clouds take their color from the setting sun, not the viewer's eyes. Indeed, Wordsworth's use of the phrase "an eye" rather than "eyes" lends itself to a reading that sees the eye as a metaphor for the sun. This reading is further strengthened by the following line as the sun (and nature in general) has commonly been considered, in contrast to short-lived humans, immortal. Rising every morning and setting every evening, the immortal sun "hath kept watch" over the rise and fall of whole races. While this dispassionate perspective must be part of the potential compensation of "the philosophic mind," it cannot be ignored that the line fits equally well as a personification of the sun. Although age may bring the wisdom of philosophy (which Plato considers preparation for death), it cannot eradicate the poet's desire to feel the joy he once had, again to see "the visionary gleam." By merging the qualities of mind which he insistently praises in the poem with a description of the sun, the poet, while sublimating the desire in metaphor, gets to eat his cake and have it too. The final lines confirm that the heart, not the head, still rules:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
(201–4)
Just as "a thought of grief" comes to the poet in the third stanza, here Wordsworth links thoughts rather than feelings to grief. Just as Charles Simic gets sad when he thinks, thoughts in Wordsworth give rise to tears. The recognition, derived from thought and memory, that something has been lost from his childhood prompts the poem. The thoughts "lie too deep for tears," confirming thought's status as prior to and cause of Wordsworth's particular grief. The only recompense for loss provided by "the philosophic mind" is the ability to bury potentially depressing thoughts deeper than emotions can reach. The poem's last lines strike with such power because of the final attempt at sublimation which they represent. They are lines expressing not the strength that derives from overcoming one's emotions, but a tenuously held stoicism that just barely suffices to keep the tears at bay. The "philosophic mind," able somewhat to reinsert its possessor into nature via metaphor (thus explaining why the child, having no need for metaphor, remains the "best Philosopher"), provides a poor compensation for what has been lost—a compensation that may, at any moment, once again fail.