The Elided Father

Abstract

‘The mighty debt which nothing can repay’ in ‘Ode, 1814’ is finally not (though it may cross the mind) the national debt swollen by financing the war with France, but rather a later manifestation of that ‘mighty debt of grief’(431) that in ‘The Vale of Esthwaite’ the adolescent Wordsworth had avowed was owed primarily to his father for a special kind of protective parentalism. Debts, however they may be converted into investments, are always irksome at some level, and Wordsworth found it unusually difficult to settle this particular one because for obscure reasons it was of its singular nature hardly to have been incurred. His recalcitrance in paying what he in that sense felt he did not owe is suggested by the half-echo of Milton’s Satan’s resentment when faced with ‘The debt immense of endless gratitude’1 to God in Paradise Lost.