‘Strength in What Remains Behind’: Wordsworth and the Question of Ageing

Abstract

Attending to the hoped-for connection between young and older generations, this essay revisits Wordsworth's poetic fascination with the elderly and the question of what, if any, consolation for emotional and physical loss could be attained for growing old. Wordsworth's imaginative impulse is to idealise the elderly into transcendent figures, which offers the compensation of a harmonious vision to the younger generation for the losses of old age that, in all likelihood, they will themselves experience. The affirmation of such a unified and compensatory vision is dependent upon the reciprocity of sympathy that Wordsworth's poetry both sets into circulation and calls into question. Readings of ‘Simon Lee’, ‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’, and ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ point up the limitations of sympathy and vision (physical and poetic) avowed in these poems as symptomatic of Wordsworth's misgivings about the debilitating effects of growing old and old age. Finally, Wordsworth's unfolding tragedy of ‘Michael’ is interpreted as reinforcing a frequent pattern, observed elsewhere in his poetry, whereby idealised figures of old men transform into disturbingly spectral second selves of their younger counterparts or narrators. These troubling transformations reveal that at the heart of Wordsworth's poetic vision of old age as a harmonious, interconnected, and consoling state, there are disquieting fears of disunity, disconnection, disconsolation, and, lastly, death.