The Themes of Immortality and Natural Piety in Wordsworth's Immortality Ode

Abstract

There is a well-known note in A. C. Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry (pp. 139-141) which defines Wordsworth's “sense or consciousness of ‘immortality’” as “at once a consciousness that he … is potentially infinite, and a consciousness that ‘he’ belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an ‘active principle’ which is eternal, indivisible, and the ‘soul of all the worlds’.” Bradley quotes (very incorrectly) three passages from the Excursion as evidence that we “remain entirely outside Wordsworth's mind” if we read ‘immortality’ without extending the conception to mean infinity, and quotes again from the Prelude a passage to illustrate “the mind's infinity or immortality,” as if the concepts are not merely related but synonymous.