Imagination as the Theme of The Prelude

Abstract

IM A G IN A T IO N AS THE THEM E OF THE PRELUDE ROSS WOODMAN University of Western Ontario Imagination having been our theme," writes Wordsworth in the concluding book of The Prelude,1 So also hath that intellectual Love, For they are each in each, and cannot stand Dividually. (xiv, 206-9). The "intellectual Love" to which he here addresses himself is, in context, presented as the pinnacle of a graduated scale. At its base is the purely instinc­ tual love that exists (in Wordsworth's example) between the lamb and its mother. Above it is the human love existing between man and woman. In literary terms, both, for Wordsworth, belong to a world of romance: a "green bower" (xiv, 176) of gratified desire where the poet enjoys the perpetual ease of "spontaneous overflow." This world of romance residing in the poet's blood and heart during the period of "thoughtless youth" [T.A., 90) is momentarily revived by Wordsworth in the opening lines of The Prelude as he contemplates the "long months of ease and undisturbed delight" (1, 26) that await him in "a known Vale" (1, 72). Committed, however, to some larger epic undertaking, Wordsworth cannot remain for long at ease there. However delightful it may be in the words of the 1805 version to "linger, lull'd and lost, and rapt away" (xiv, 159), such delight is, in the "severer interventions" (1, 355) of the poet's revising mind in the 1850 version, "pitiable" (xiv, 180). And it is pitiable because, in celebrating the animal and human forms of love, the poet's joy falls short of its transcendent object. In the 1805 version, this transcendent object is the mind itself, described by Wordsworth as "the brooding Soul" (xiv, 165); in the 1850 version, it is externalized as the Hebrew-Christian God who, seated upon his throne, re­ ceives "heaven inspired" tribute "on the knees of prayer" and "the wings of praise" (xiv, 184-86). Whatever one thinks of the substitution of "the Almighty's Throne" (xiv, 187) for "the brooding Soul," the fact remains that Wordsworth's subject in The Prelude is the growth of his own poetic mind. Looking into it (almost as the English Studies in Ca n ad a, i , 4 (winter 1975) poet in "The Fall of Hyperion" looks into "the dark secret chamber of [Moneta's] skull" [i, 278]), Wordsworth in 1800 believed that he had as a poet surpassed Milton by virtue of the direction of his gaze. Milton, Wordsworth argued, by his reliance upon an obsolete theology, had avoided a more direct coming to grips with his own inherent powers. Compared to the revelations awaiting Wordsworth in the recesses of his own poetic mind, Milton's "heaven of heavens" was, in Wordsworth's 1800 view, nothing more than a veiled image grounded in an inadequate understanding of the workings of the creative mind. He could, therefore, pass unalarmed "Jehovah-with his thunder, and the choir / Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones," finding as he did something altogether more fearful and awesome in the mysterious workings of his own brain. For Milton's mythos of God, Wordsworth substituted a new and radical mythos of mind. So long, of course, as Wordsworth was content to remain as a poet in a world of romance, his theme of imagination was limited to the mind's marriage "to this goodly universe / In love and holy passion,” which would serve to reveal "Paradise, and groves / Elysian" in the immediate world of eye and ear, nature becoming an icon of the mind's desire. Like Milton before him, however, Wordsworth's ceaseless "mental fight" drove him beyond the vision of an earthly paradise with the inherent limitations it imposed upon the reach of mind. If the poetic mind was to be revealed in its "absolute" (xiv, 190), as distinct from relative, power, competing with and even surpassing Milton's mythos of God, then it would have to be explored in what Wordsworth calls its "strength / Of usurpation" (vi, 599-600). For Wordsworth the mind dwells "above" (xiv, 450) rather than within "this frame of things," is "of quality and fabric more...