WORDSWORTH — MAN AND POET:
SOME REFLECTIONS IN 1970
1970 makes two hundred years since Wordsworth was born. Both during his lifetime and after, a lot has been written about the man and the poet. He is a figure of considerable importance and we may well set ourselves to throw together some facts and observations to stimulate a living perception of this strange and great figure.
APPEARANCE AND RELATIONSHIPS
Let us start with his appearance. We have often heard him described as most unpoetically horse-faced. But that is not the impression produced on all. Nor did he himself regard his physiognomy as poor. When Hazlitt spoke of his forehead as being narrow, Wordsworth exclaimed: "Narrow forehead! I went through three large magazines of hats in Paris, before I could find one large enough, and yet my skull is almost cut away behind." It is also helpful to recall Leigh Hunt's impression of his eyes: "Certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural. They were like fires half-burning, half-smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes."
Now to his life and work. First, his relationships. It is well known today that the highly respectable and conservative sage who never let any suggestion of sensuality or of lawlessness enter his poetic works had been a sower of wild oats in his youth. He was a young man when the French Revolution broke out and in the early phase of it he was actually in France, one of the little group of fiery orators who called themselves Girondins and with whom probably he would have gone to the guillotine, had he remained longer in the country. During his stay there he had a tempestuous
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liaison with a girl named Annette Vallon who bore him a child. Herbert Read has noted that Wordsworth's genius awakened suddenly after his experiences in France, developed gloriously in the next nine years during which he had not given up the idea of marrying Annette as soon as the political situation would make it possible for him to return to her land, and declined from the time of his sedate marriage with Mary Hutchinson.
There seems little doubt that his efforts to remove all trace of Annette from his life had a harmful effect on the spontaneity and power of his inspiration. But to connect the spontaneity and power wholly with Annette is to exaggerate her significance in his life and to forget that the "culture of feeling" in which his genius lay and which made him write —
....all grandeur comes,
All truth and beauty from pervading love,
That gone, we are as dust —
was not concerned only with natural human interchanges of emotion between man and woman but with a sort of cosmic sensibility, an awareness of all life and nature in terms of the deep heart. About "every natural form, rock, fruit and flower,/Even the loose stones that cover the highway" he used in his Prelude the phrase that is one of his most astonishing in bare power: "I saw them feel." And he adds:
...the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul.
His "culture of feeling" was a multi-mooded pantheism in which the deep heart of man communed with and got illumination from the sentient Spirit of the universe which was the ultimate ground of man's own self.
If any particular woman contributed vitally to the growth of Wordsworth's poetry it could not be Annette Vallon. She may have stirred his poetic imagination and remained a significant stimulus for many years, but it was his sister
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Dorothy who principally kept his genius alive; she was a true sister to his soul, feeding it and strengthening it by her own extreme sensitiveness to the details as well as to the vast general presence of nature. She was little of a philosopher, but no finer companion could a pantheistic poet hope for. And between her and Wordsworth there was a special passage of feeling which brought an intense personal colour to their companionship. There was something of a pure physical passion about their intimacy — nothing perverted by any direct sexuality but a love, both acute and profound, that went beyond mere brotherliness and sisterliness. No sister, in the common acceptation of the term, would dream of writing to her brother as Dorothy did when telling Wordsworth how she tried to bear his temporary absence: "I tasted and bit the apple where you had bitten it." And, again, no ordinary brother could write as he did of her:
And she who dwells with me, whom I have loved
With such communion that no place on earth
Can ever be a solitude to me.
Most probably the celebrated "Lucy" poems which are Wordsworth's high-water mark of personal love-expression were really a dramatic transformation of his relation with Dorothy. An actual Lucy has not been identified yet, while all his descriptions of her as "a child of nature" and all his tenderness and devotion in writing of her agree with what we know of Dorothy's temperament and of his relation with her. At least the poem, A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, that most Wordsworthians take to belong to the "Lucy" series, Coleridge terms "a most sublime epitaph which, in all likelihood, reflected some gloomy moment when the poet had fancied the time his sister might die".*
* Sri Aurobindo has read a purely spiritual — pantheistic — experience in the lyric and the present author has written at length to substantiate Sri Aurobindo's interpretation (Mother India, August 1956). Coleridge's authority is not definitive. Does not Wordsworth himself declare in general that nobody
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And we know for a fact that the glow-worm incident described in the "Lucy" poem starting "Among all lovely things my Love had been" took place in 1795 — most probably at Racedown — between the poet and his sister.
Not Annette, therefore, but Dorothy was Wordsworth's main inspirer and sustainer. And if his genius suffered gradual eclipse after his marriage to Mary Hutchinson it was not so much because he drew the curtain completely over Annette and became respectable as because the new relationship cut across his unusual communion with Dorothy and she was too dutiful a woman to come in any way between man and wife. We know that she suffered terribly by the marriage: even if it did not lead directly to the loss of reason, to which she became subject, it has much to do with her living for twenty years an invalid in Wordsworth's house.
Wordsworth had too much self-conceit to experience the same heartbreak, he had also a philosophic intellect to fall back upon, an intellect which was not dependent on Dorothy; but his poetic springs could not help drying up, especially as he was also altogether out of touch with the only other human being of his circle who could sustain both his heart and his imagination in the paths of poetry — Coleridge. Coleridge above anyone else nourished Wordsworth's philosophic intellect and made it poetically creative, just as Wordsworth in his turn gave Coleridge's unstable and erratic genius strength and staying power. Coleridge's tragedy was even greater than Wordsworth's for when he got estranged from his friend he lost Dorothy as well, whereas his friend had her for many more years to keep his mind kindled. But when Dorothy was made to play second fiddle in Wordsworth's emotional life and Coleridge had become just a splendid memory, the poet of The Prelude and the simple yet profound lyrics and the beautifully contem-
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really understood him, "not even Coleridge", because the latter was "not happy enough"? However, we are not here concerned with this or any other reading: we are concerned with the identification which Coleridge, taking the poem to be an unhappy one, an epitaph, made between its "she" and Dorothy.
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plative sonnets and the supreme Ode on Intimations of Immortality started on the way to becoming a dry stick.
TRAITS OF CHARACTER
He grew not only staid and respectable but also ridiculous in many things. For instance, he refused to attend de Quincy's marriage to the country girl who had borne him several children. In his later years he could not endure to read Goethe; he found in Goethe's works "a profligacy, an inhuman sensuality" which he described as "utterly revolting". He wrote a whole series of sonnets praising capital punishment. Several traits of his character which were merely odd in his younger days became now cranky no less than offensive.
Even in his younger days he had always a certain self-righteousness and a particularly high opinion of all he expressed in his writings. No poet of the nineteenth century, except perhaps Tennyson who perpetrated lines like "The monkey would not eat since little Willie died," could have come out quite seriously with the line "A Mr. Wilkerson, a clergyman" as if it were great poetry, or with a strange lapse of poetic taste begun one of his best sonnets dedicated to National Independence and Liberty with the word "Jones". One recalls also his sudden remark at a dinner party: "Davy, do you know why I published The White Doe of Rylstone in quarto?" "No," replied Davy. Then Wordsworth said: "To show the world my opinion of it." One remembers too his statement to Lamb: "I believe I could write like Shakespeare if I had a mind to try it." We do not know what he said when Lamb's answer came, as swiftly as the stutter would allow: "Yes, n-nothing is w-wanting but the m-mind."
There is a bit of odd conceit, though mixed with a bit of startling common sense, in that incident in the English Channel where he and Dorothy and Mary had gone boating. A squall overtook them and it seemed as if the boat would
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capsize. Wordsworth coolly took off his coat and vest and prepared to swim ashore, leaving his wife and his sister to drown because they could not swim. Luckily the weather changed, but that resolve to save his own skin was strangely in contrast to the sentiment he had voiced in the sonnet to his wife:
Dearer to me than life and light are dear!
Many other quaint glimpses we have of him, not always showing him in an egoistic or humourless light. Once on talking of letter-writing and the care that men like Southey lavished on it he said that such was his horror of having his letters preserved, that in order to guard against it he always took pains to make them as bad and dull as possible! There is considerable simplicity as much as the poet's proverbial enthusiasm about his own products, in the account Haydon gives of Wordsworth reading one of his most famous poems, The Leach-Gatherer, to his hairdresser! Even the egoism that was his was mostly unconscious: there was no deliberate attempt to magnify himself, nor any resentment of circumstances which put him in a laughable situation. When he had to go to receive his Laureateship he had no appropriate garments in his own wardrobe and went dressed in Samuel Rogers's ill-fitting suit. According to custom he had to get down on both knees. But so tight was the suit that he could not get up at all and had to be helped to a standing posture. Nothing on record indicates that he here minded looking funny, though surely he must have known the comic figure he cut, kneeling on the floor for an inordinate length of time until the bystanders realised his predicament. That he was not quite without either humour or charm is testified by Charles Greville who described him at almost sixty as "very cheerful, merry, courteous and talkative". His mood of merriment is evidenced by an anecdote related by Haydon. Wordsworth and Haydon were walking across Hyde Park one day and Wordsworth was quoting his beautiful address
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to the stock dove. On finishing the poem he started telling Haydon how once in a wood Mrs. Wordsworth and a lady were walking, when the stock dove was cooing. A farmer's wife coming by said to herself, "Oh I do like stock doves!" Mrs. Wordsworth, in all her enthusiasm for her husband's poetry, took the old woman to her heart; "but", continued the old woman, "some like them in a pie; for my part there's nothing like 'em stewed in onions."
POETIC EXPRESSION
The stock dove brings us back to Wordsworth the poet. And after all it is as the poet that Wordsworth is great and destined to be remembered. What is the value of his poetic experience and expression? Not all that he wrote appealed to his fellow-poets. Blake was so upset that he got a bowel complaint that nearly killed him, when he read Wordsworth's lines on passing Jehovah unalarmed and on realising that nothing
can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our minds, into the mind of man.
"Does Mr. Wordsworth think he can surpass Jehovah?" Blake asked in horror. On the other hand, when the Immortality Ode was read out to him, he fell into almost hysterical rapture. In this connection we may mention Wordsworth's own attitude to Blake. When some of Blake's abnormalities were reported to him, he remarked: "The insanity of this man interests me far more than the sanity of Byron and Moore." The remark shows how much against Wordsworth's grain ran the slick sentimentalism of Moore and the crude power of Byron and how the central motif in his own writings was the feeling of universal mystery and the sense of profundities in the human soul. He did not have
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Blake's awareness of what Dr. Otto calls the "numinous", the Mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the transcendent Godhead, but even more intensely than Blake he had the consciousness of the perfect presence and the ineffable peace that live secretly not only in the mind of man but also in the earth, the ocean, the sky — the Cosmic Godhead who looks out at us from things of beauty and majesty, who lures us with magical or tranquil distances and
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
Tennyson regarded this line from Tintern Abbey as the grandest in the entire range of English poetry. Perhaps Tennyson indulged in a little exaggeration, but part of the exaggeration consists in overlooking the fact that some other lines of Wordsworth himself merit to be ranked beside it among the greatest treasures of poetic expression in English: for example,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills,
or
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,
... a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
In a less august manner, too, Wordsworth can work up to a marvellous felicity:
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The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place,
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
But, of course, Wordsworth is not all perfection. There are immense stretches of aridity and abstractness in him, especially in his later work. And not everything that even fine critics have praised is pure gold. Thus, it is impossible to agree with Keats when he remarked that The Excursion was one of the wonders of the age. Much less can we join Coleridge in that fantastic estimate of The Borderers, a play of Wordsworth: "His drama is absolutely wonderful. There are those profound touches of the human heart, which I find three or four times in The Robbers of Schiller and often in Shakespeare, but in Wordsworth there are no inequalities."
Yes, there is a lot of padding in many of Wordsworth's poems, but as he wrote a large amount of poetry the quantity of true gold is also huge. And whatever he wrote he did with care and scruple, even though they could not always result in imaginative finish as distinguished from intellectual polish. Dorothy records in her diary how her brother once made himself sick, finding a new epithet for the cuckoo. And we know how there was no facility in at least the manner of composition: he used to pace restlessly in the groves of Alfoxden or on the garden path of Grasmere while composing poetry. Nor was he averse to correction and chiselling and recasting: he did believe in spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, but he had no superficial idea of what spontaneity consisted in. It did not, for him, consist in just the first draft of a poem, neither did it lie in an uncontrolled or unselective expression. His poem, Dion, originally opened with a descriptive stanza beginning —
Fair as the Swan whose majesty, prevailing
O'er breezeless water on Locarno's lake —
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but he resolutely cut it out because it detained the reader too long from the real subject and precluded, rather than prepared for, the subsequent reference to Plato. His principle, as declared in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, was that the poet should never "interweave a foreign splendour of his own with that which the passion naturally suggests". Hence, on the side of matter and substance, spontaneity lay in avoiding all imaginative superfluity, all incongruity of vision, however beautiful in itself. On the side of form and style, it was equivalent to the avoidance of what he called "poetic diction", the artificial language the eighteenth century had employed as well as the tortured language often favoured by the seventeenth century and the late Elizabethans. In the pursuit of this spontaneity of form he was often conscientiously studious. "I have bestowed," he says, "great pains on my style, full as much as any of my contemporaries have done on theirs. I yield to none in love for my art. I therefore, labour at it with reverence, affection and industry. My main endeavour, as to style, is that my poems should be written in pure intelligible English."
By "pure intelligible English" he was at one time inclined to denote "the real language of men in any situation", but later described it as, in his own words, "a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation". In practice he wavered between the two definitions and not infrequently went beyond either when he achieved his greatest effects, but when understanding his criterion we must remember that in speaking of "men" he did not confine himself to his ordinary contemporaries, much less his humble Cumberland neighbours: he included also "men" like Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, the three poets he perhaps valued most. What he really aimed at when he intuitively rather than intellectually understood and followed his theory was a certain simplicity and austerity wedded to intensity, as in lines about happy commonalty, like
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
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or in lines of personal pathos, like
And never lifted up a single stone,
or in lines of poignant racial retrospect,
...old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago,
or in lines drenched with the tears of things, like
The still, sad music of humanity...
The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.
The last quotation can serve as a good starting-point for a few remarks on Wordsworth's technical artistry. The adjectives "heavy" and "weary" with their common y-ending reinforce each other's sense by sound while the w-beginning in three words has a marked expansive effect hinting the immensity of the burden, and that immensity with its peculiar ambiguous and baffling character is brought into apt relief by the lengthy yet slackly moving and lingering epithet "unintelligible". Similarly a most skilful play on the varying sounds of o and a is part of the inevitability of those two lines of poignant racial retrospect cited already from The Solitary Reaper. There is perfect art, full of the sense of water hailing from hidden sources, in the many-shaded crystalline rhythm of
Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves.
And nothing could be finer for conjuring up both beauty and mystery than the alliterative phrase in the poem where a young woman is told that if she remains a child of nature, grey hairs will never sadden her,
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But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
Wordsworth is particularly felicitous with names of places. As faultlessly used for poetic effect as Glaramara and Lapland is the name of those remote islands in that couplet, sibilant as well as liquid, which is a masterpiece of half atmospheric half psychological strangeness —
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
An effect not so strangely evocative but as deeply and skilfully intoned is where Wordsworth says to the spirit of liberty whose chosen home he considers to be England and Switzerland, the one country full of the sea's voice and the other full of the voice of the hills:
what sorrow would it be
That mountain floods should thunder as before,
And ocean bellow from his rocky shore,
And neither awful voice be heard by thee!
Little room remains for doubting that Wordsworth was not incapable of careful conscious art. His many lapses are mostly due to the extreme importance he attached to whatever figured in his perception or experience: the novelty, on the whole, of both thought and feeling that formed the centre of his world-message made him rest complacent again and again with the bare intellectual statement of it — he was not so absorbingly an artist as to admit nothing without the stamp on it of beauty; but there was sufficiently the beauty-lover in him to enable the artist to function effectively not only on the sheer breath of inspiration but also on afterthought and back-view and with the help of sifting and polishing and revising. His frequently wide-awake sensi-
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tiveness to word-values is illustrated by the remark we have quoted from Dorothy about his feverish exertion to hit upon a revealing adjective for the cuckoo, and also by his own reference to Sir Walter Scott: "Walter Scott is not a careful composer. He allows himself many liberties which betray a want of respect for his reader. He quoted, as from me,
The swan, on 'sweet' St. Mary's lake,
Floats double, swan and shadow,
instead of 'still', thus obscuring my idea and betraying his own uncritical principles of composition." Clearly, Scott's word was conventional claptrap: not only what Wordsworth would have called the spirit of the lake remained uncaught but also the experience he had sought to convey was spoiled by an alien element. The acute and direct communication which, together with intense sympathetic vision, Wordsworth aimed at in his poetry could indeed never be possible unless often enough he had the capacity to be, in Keats's phrase, "a miser of sound and syllable."
POETIC ARTISTRY
However, we must distinguish his artistry from Keats's. Keats was the word-craftsman par excellence and it almost appears as if he wanted intensity of vision and feeling more because they could electrify language into breath-bereaving exquisiteness or splendour than for its own revelatory life-enrichment. Wordsworth had the conviction that he had extraordinary things to say and that poetry was the best instrument of embalming as well as transmitting his experience. Keats was drunk with the wine of words and in order to make it always'champagne instead of common claret or even good Burgundy he desired the richest and loveliest ideas and emotions to distil it from. The Muse accomplishes her end in various ways: somehow or other she wants great
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meaning married to great music and she makes diverse temperaments and dispositions her vehicles, and it matters little what starting-point is adopted. But significant differences will be there in the poet's attitude to his creative work in relation to both manner and matter.
Wordsworth could rarely treat language as anything save a necessity: Keats could easily treat it as a luxury. Even the abundance of the former was mostly a prodigious piling up of effects economical and clear-cut; even the brevity of the latter tended to be astonishingly packed with "fine excess". In regard to matter, Wordsworth, dominated by his own definite sight and emotion, was anxious that his words should be utterly faithful to them. He had a special meaning antecedent to expression and when he cast about for the correct phrase it was for that which embodied with fine exactitude his meaning. Keats had a more fluid consciousness, a "negative capability" — as he called it — which enabled him to feel that his own self was undefined and could immediately become the self of whatever he saw, be it a tree or a pecking bird or an idle stone. He gave no importance to any fixed meaning arising out of his own previous experience or meditation: he cared only for the most beautiful significance he could get out of the vast potentialities of language at the disposal of the broad scheme or theme he had in mind. He would welcome any suggestion valuable in itself and assimilable by his subject: it would not trouble him in the least if instead of writing the poem he intended he turned out something entirely dissimilar in mood or direction. In this he resembled Shakespeare who, among English poets, was the most protean genius we know of, though Shakespeare was not so keenly conscious a connoisseur of words and threw up his wondrous wealth of them out of a masterly multifarious vitality much more vibrant than Keats's. Wordsworth resembled Milton who, among English poets, was the most firmly structured genius on record, though Milton differed in being far ahead of Wordsworth in sustained artistry and far behind him in
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either poignancy or amplitude of spiritual perception suffusing and transfiguring the powerful analytic and synthetic mentality.
POETIC EXPERIENCE
In that poignancy, in that amplitude of spiritual perception is Wordsworth's uniqueness in the poetic literature of England. There have been attempts to depreciate this uniqueness, calling that poignancy and that amplitude pretence and woolliness. We may, of course, enjoy a witticism like James Stephens's apropos of the famous line in the Immortality Ode —
Heaven lies about us in our infancy —
"That is no reason why we should lie about Heaven in our old age." But it is impossible to take seriously any detraction of Wordsworth's far-reaching spiritual quality. He was the first Seer in English poetic literature, answering in however limited a measure to the definition of seerhood current in the mystic Orient: one who has known by direct intuition and by intimate personal realisation and by concrete entry of consciousness a Divine Reality at once emanating, containing and pervading the universe, an Existence that is an infinite Consciousness and eternal Bliss and the secret Self of all things and beings.
Wordsworth's seer-sense of this Reality is not a possession always intense and all-permeating, but it forms the permanent background of his best work and at several places comes to the fore and then his poetry is the sheer speech of the Godhead residing in cosmic nature. He is not strictly a nature poet, catching felicitously the colour and atmosphere and thrill of her myriad phenomena: he is the singer of the mighty and superhuman presence whose outer face and body is she or, rather, whose manifold degree of manifestation make up her stuff and activity. Together with
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Shelley who was an atheist according to conventional Christian standards just as Wordsworth was according to the same standards an apostate — together with Shelley he is the greatest Yogi of pantheism that has appeared in the poetic history of England.
But we must not understand either his pantheism or Shelley's in a narrow sense which erases all distinctions between high and low, good and evil, right and wrong. If important distinctions had not been acknowledged in Reality's outer field, Shelley would never have had the ardour of the world-reformer or Wordsworth the zeal of the character-builder. But their ardour and zeal arose from something beyond the mere moral consciousness, some light of which this consciousness is itself a variable reflection, and that is why they instinctively looked for the source of all good not in the rational will but in some indescribable vastness of peace or in some ineffable wideness of ecstasy that are the hidden universal oneness of all diversities, even all contradictions. And of the two pantheists the more powerful was Wordsworth, though Shelley was the more vivid. Wordsworth it was who awoke in Shelley the pantheist dormant within the rebel against orthodox Christianity, and Wordsworth it was who had the more massive awareness of what he called "Wisdom and Spirit of the universe", an awareness which dissolved more effectively than Shelley's feeling of the "white radiance of Eternity" the pains and fears infesting mortal life, and which replaced them with an enduring calm until Wordsworth could recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
WORDSWORTH'S PANTHEISM AND SHELLEY'S
The greater massiveness of Wordsworth's pantheism than of Shelley's derived from the fact that Shelley lived in a certain luminous detachment from flesh and blood, and the
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pantheistic intuition he shared with Wordsworth was not equally interfused with "the meanest flower that blows". Pantheos, for him, shone rather through than in the meanest flower, and had indeed a brighter vibrancy because of not being one substance with clay, but lacked the solidity, as it were, which Wordsworth found because he felt clay to be only the dense superficies of a single Reality whose lustre-packed interior was God. The solidity not merely makes for us Wordsworth's realisation more overwhelming in its tranquillity than Shelley's in its exhilaration: it also takes, for all the richer effect Shelley has on us, a firmer grip on flesh and blood with which it is subtly continuous; so that, by its effect, however vaguely, in even our outer being
We feel that we are greater than we know.
Shelley was like an exile from some Beyond against which the defects of the physical universe, in spite of that universe's shimmering transparency to one kind of spiritual sight, stood out grimly to another. To remove these defects he was all afire: he was a perfectionist haunted by the idealities of his Beyond and the redeeming powers necessary to bring about world-transfiguration were conceived by him as an occult company — ethereal Dreams and Splendours, "Winged Persuasions and veiled Destinies". Towards such strange presences he held forth his hands, and when his ardour of world-transfiguration got increasingly frustrated a poignant melancholy sat at the core of his rapture. Although Wordsworth was no alien to earth's defects, the redeeming powers for him were no occult company but in the very activities of nature and humanity. He names his province — intra-terrestrial rather than ultra-terrestrial — when he tells the unfortunate Negro liberator of San Domingo, Toussaint L'Ouverture:
Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee, air, earth, and skies:
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There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.
Not that Shelley is without fight: after all, he has written Prometheus Unbound and its grand close is as heroic, as loftily strong, in the midst of the world's wreckage as this apostrophe to Toussaint. The difference, however, is that Shelley is bravely defiant while Wordsworth is bravely acceptant: the one is obsessed by earth's recalcitrance and frets to make a heaven out of what seems most earthy, the other is convinced that there is no great cause for disappointment and that the pantheistic realisation is sufficient refuge and that by its building up an inner life the sharp need is removed for wishing away the many rigidities and angularities of outer fact. Nature, in Wordsworth's eyes, has in her deep breast an asylum here and now for the anguish that frequently arises in us owing to physical vicissitudes. Shelley cannot make his peace completely with world and life and time: perhaps his most Shelleyan lines were the exquisite fragment he wrote a few months before his death and which a critic has regarded as having an unequalled intensity of aspiration:
I loved — ah, no, I mean not one of ye,
Or any earthly soul, though ye are dear
As human heart to human heart may be,
I loved I know not what; but this lone sphere
And all that it contains, contains not thee,
Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.
An insatiable spiritual idealism is in this fragment — a pantheistic ecstasy which is yet touched with an agonised dream of some perfect Beyond and thereby subtly differentiated from, though not proved less valuable in its essence than, Wordsworth's calm intuition of the omnipresent Godhead. Of course, we cannot say that Shelley is never
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quite Wordsworthian in mood or that Wordsworth is always untinged by the Shelleyan perception. Poetic moods and perceptions are seldom found in watertight compartments. Yet we shall not be wrong in thinking the most Wordsworthian lines to be perhaps the fragment retrieved by Mr. H. de Selincourt, suggesting no perfect Beyond but magnificently emphasising a single-selfed Within:
One interior life
In which all beings live with God, themselves
Are God, existing in the mighty whole,
As indistinguishable as the cloudless east
At noon is from the cloudless west, when all
The hemisphere is one cerulean blue.
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