Some Foundations for Reading Wordsworth's Ode

John Stuart Mill was one of the most important writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century. Trained from a very early age by his father in a kind of experiment in perfectly rational education, Mill was an early and forceful advocate for utilitarianism--a somewhat mechanistic and purely rational moral philosophy that is now known more by its satiric treatment in Dickens' Hard Times, and the catchy philosophical soundbite, "the greatest good for the greatest number." But as his friends knew and as the Victorian reading public would discovery only after his death, Mill's education to be the perfect embodiment of rationality took a huge toll in the form of serious bouts of depression and a mental collapse so severe that he admits in his posthumously published autobiography to having lost the will to live. Mill movingly recounts his depression and what came to his aid: literature. He recalls reading a  memoir and being moved to tears when contemplating the feelings of a young man left without a father. That moment convinced Mill that he was still capable of feeling and he dates his recovery from that day.

Feeling, and the imaginative sympathy that is often a key component of reading, rescued Mill from his false belief that he had been trained not to feel. He notes specifically that he sought out poetry as his cure, turning first to Byron because that poet was known for his cultivation and communication of "intenser" feelings. Byron proved to be the wrong medicine, for that poet's moods were too much like his own. Mill then turned to Wordsworth and found in his poetry and found there just what he needed:

I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the conclusion of the Poems [Collected Poems of 1815] came the famous “Ode,” falsely called Platonic, “Intimations of Immortality”: in which, along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it. I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he. (Mill, Autobiography, "A Crisis in My Mental History")

Wordsworth's Ode

Ode: a long, usually stately lyric poem in stanzas of varied metrical pattern employing a high style

M. H. Abrams on the “greater Romantic lyric”: “In the course of [his] meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation” (201).

Form

Three sections

Stanzas 1-4: Loss

Stanzas 5-8: The story of how we lose

Stanzas 9-11: The promise of compensation

Turns and counterturns (note especially in the early stanzas)

“There was a time” (1) -> “It is not now as it hath been” (6)

“The Rainbow comes and goes” (10) -> “But yet I know” (18)

“a thought of grief” (22) -> “I again am strong” (24)

The Big Question

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

Reverses the story of maturation

We grow into society / darkness / isolation / culture / custom

We grow away from God / Light / Connection / Nature / Imagination

Balancing Losses and Compensations

Stanza	Then	Now
1	celestial light glory and freshness of a dream	can see no more
2	Rainbow comes and goes . . .	there hath past away a glory from the earth
3	fullness of your bliss	thought of grief
4	visionary gleam glory and the dream	if I were sullen whither is fled
5	not in entire forgetfulness trailing clouds of glory Heaven lies about us Nature’s Priest vision splendid	a sleep and a forgetting shades of the prison house Man perceives it die away fade into the light of common day
6	[Nature’s] Foster-child glories he hath known imperial palace whence he came	Inmate Man Earth fills her lap with pleasures
7	his dream of human life	some fragment of [his dream of human life] this hath now his heart fit his tongue to dialogues of business, love, strife, the little Actor As if his whole vocation / Were endless imitation
8	Thy Soul’s immensity Thou best philosopher thou Eye among the blind read’st the eternal deep haunted forever by the eternal mind Mighty Prophet Seer blest glorious in the might	In darkness lost darkness of the grave to bring the inevitable yoke blindly with thy blessedness at strife earthly freight custom lie upon thee with a weight

Stanza	Loss	Gain
9	Delight and liberty simple creed / Of Childhood new-fledged hope that immortal sea / which brought us hither [cannot be children on the shore]	perpetual benediction obstinate questionings blank misgivings first affections Our souls have sight of that immortal sea . . . see the Children sport upon the shore
10	radiance once so bright spendour in the grass glory in the flower	primal sympathy soothing thoughts that spring / Out of human suffering faith that looks through death years that bring philosophic mind
11	to live beneath [Nature’s] more habitual sway [a time when I] tripped lightly as [the brooks] the innocent brightness of a new-born Day	sober coloring kept watch o’er man’s mortality To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.