This Life, This Death: Wordsworth’s Poetic Destiny

Of further special interest, must be how Wordsworth comes to terms with the loss of his former visionary life, how he responds to his loss, for indeed much of The Prelude may be said to be about what he could still conceive for himself in spite of this loss. But however far he extends himself with his further purpose in this poem, and however grand in the end is his projection for the future (and there seems to have been no limit to what he felt he could claim on behalf of the Poet of Nature to make up for what he had lost, as we shall see towards the end of this study), primarily his identity had been shaped by his disconnection from his past. Wordsworth’s obsession with what he has lost prevails over his sense of purpose in The Prelude to this point: that he becomes, by 1804, centred in what he has lost, in relation to which his continuing account in The Prelude is ultimately reactive: he must try to summarize and abstract the history, and generalize the life he has lost, for future reference, before it is too late. In the meantime the essential Wordsworth remains the Wordsworth who at a certain point turns his attention back, yearningly, to the “visionary gleam”—in Intimations. He thereby becomes the great poet of the ‘light’, in this sense of looking back, which becomes for him a way of seizing ‘again’ on what we bring into the world as an impulse of ‘life’. His looking back to the light would remain his most cherished impulse just because he had had it and lost it when diverted from his own spontaneous development, as we have seen. Just when he turned his attention to the visionary life that had principally gone into making him as a poet, he found that he had been separated from it. That he had had it so close to hand, just before he could see that he had lost it, is what makes him subsequently yearn for it all the more, especially as he sees it all from the outside now, except for the occasional wishful flashbacks, and the impulse he has yet to poetically remember. What is more, a sudden new sense of death intensifies and is itself intensified by the thought of what he had, once, of the power of light and life. Wordsworth as the poet of the visionary life is lost, and it concerns him all the more now that he feels he faces death and a new darkness, “the darkness of the grave”, without the light that he once knew.