“The Consecration, and the Poet’s Dream”: Evasion and Revision in the Elegies for John Wordsworth

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article reads Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle” alongside his three other elegies for his brother John: “To the Daisy,” “I only looked for pain and grief,” and “Distressful gift.” Against more traditional Freudian readings of the work of mourning as a gradual detachment from the dead, I argue that Wordsworth actually worked backwards through this process, confronting himself with the reality of John’s sacrifices at sea. One by one, Wordsworth rejected each consoling trope and image from the 1805 elegies, forcing himself to encounter “frequent sights of what is to be borne” and thus to repay a symbolic debt to his brother. In the “Elegiac Stanzas,” Wordsworth frequently refers back to the previous poems, locating “The consecration, and the Poet’s dream” in the elegies which he had written the previous year, and making amends for the “tender fictions” through which he had sought consolation.