Wordsworth and the Infancy of Affection

Abstract

ALEXANDER FREER Wordsworth and the Infancy ofAffection All the new thinking is about loss. —Robert Hass' i W ordsworth’s “ode: intimations of immortality from recollections of Early Childhood” contrasts its speaker’s current existence with the recollections ofinfancy which he is neither able to fully recall, nor completely evade. The poem insists on the minimal continuity between infant sensation and adult experience. Infant experience is shown to be both an impossible topic and the only possible topic for a poem about ori­ gins: impossible because the representation of infant experience is under­ mined even at the level of the sentence; necessary because this experience is nonetheless the only source of insight we have into the nature of the soul. In opposition to critics who either seek to elevate adulthood over in­ fancy and read the poem as a consolation of philosophy, or elevate infancy over adulthood and read the poem as nostalgic elegy, I will follow Stuart Sperry and Kenneth Johnston in acknowledging Wordsworth’s productive ambivalence between the two states. The “Ode,” as Johnston notes, suc­ ceeds in “deriving gain from the felt reality ofloss,” but it does not suppose a calculation ofoverall profit or loss.2 My aim is to substantiate an “ambiva­ lent” interpretation of the poem through a broadly psychoanalytic reading of the “Ode” and its consideration of infant and adult experience. Using and extending Mutlu Konuk Biasing’s Lyric Poetry, I will suggest how the poem might both acknowledge an irreversible loss and maintain what Sperry calls “an almost physical sense of continuity through time.”3 Contit . Hass, Praise (New York: Echo Press, 1979), 4. 2. Johnston, “Recollecting Forgetting: Forcing Paradox to the Limit in the ‘Intimations Ode,’” The Wordsworth Circle 2, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 64. 3. Sperry, “From ‘Tintern Abbey’ to the ‘Intimations Ode’: Wordsworth and the Func­ tion of Memory,” The Wordsworth Circle 1, no. 2 (Spring 1970): 41. SiR, 54 (Spring 2015) 79 80 ALEXANDER FREER nuity is possible, I will argue, through discontinuity: the lost affects of infancy that momentarily return, transfigured, in adult life. To this end, I will also question an assumption of some more recent ac­ counts of the “Ode” which assert determinate narratives. John Beer sug­ gests Wordsworth achieves “adult stability,” Paul Fry contends that the speaker voluntarily gives up childhood pretending, and James Chandler reads the text as a “progress poem.”4 Such readings rely on the cogency of what Daniel W. Ross calls “Wordsworth’s carefully rationalized conclusion that the ‘philosophic mind’ is worth surrendering the powers of childhood for.”5 We should note the language of choice here: the speaker is to be commended for accepting adulthood and, for Fry and Ross, deciding to “grow up.” Such comparisons allow commentators, following in the tradi­ tion of Helen Vendler, to paint the “Ode” as poetic and intellectual prog­ ress.6 Equally, for critics who do not intuitively prefer the philosophic mind to “God, who is our home,” such conclusions are unfounded. As Anya Taylor demonstrates, there is a tradition of religious readings which arrive at the opposite conclusion.7 As Vendler notes, there is a degree ofquestion­ begging at work on both sides: Those readers who respond most strongly to the powerful adaptation of religious language at the opening of the ode will continue to feel that the dirge, having the “best” lines, is the “real” subject of the poem. Those who prefer the stoic and reparatory adult tone of the ending may agree with Trilling in rebuking the elegiac partisan.8 The debate is premised on the adult speaker realizing either that adulthood is superior (cognitively richer) or indeed inferior (spiritually poorer) to childhood. Yet the “time” “when meadow, grove, and stream . . . To me did seem / Apparell’d in celestial light” cannot be clearly recollected by the adult speaker.9 It seems more pressing that we ask why this is. The obvious answer, that he has straightforwardly forgotten, does not ring true. The 4. Beer, Wordsworth in Time (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979), 110-11; Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 153; Chandler, “Wordsworth’s Great Ode: Romanticism and the Progress...