[Reprinted from The Wordworth Circle XVI (spring, 1985) 48-56, originally delivered as the Peter Laver Memorial Lecture at the Wordsworth Summer Conference, Grasmere, 1984] To deliver this Pete Laver Memorial Lecture at the Wordsworth Summer Conference is an honour and a sad reminder of what Yeats called, in his elegy for Robert Gregory, discourtesy of death. The mixture of bewilderment and celebration which underlies Yeats's poem will be shared by of you who knew Pete Laver, and some of its lines could fit into his epitaph: all things the delighted eye now sees / Were loved by him; had the intensity / To have published to be a world's delight. Since arriving in Grasmere, I have been acutely aware of the absence of this poet, librarian, artist and free spirit, displaced so suddenly and prematurely from his place, but I am also happy to have been invited to speak this evening in his memory and to affirm his continuing presence in our affections. In his introduction to Jung's psychology, Anthony Storr gives an account of a case that bears closely upon the situation of the poet in Northern Ireland or the poet anywhere else: Jung describes how some of his patients, faced with what appeared to be an conflict, solved it by outgrowing it, by developing a level of consciousness. He writes: Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient's horizon, and through this broadening of his outlook the lost its urgency. It was not solved logically on its own terms but faded out when faced with a new and stronger life urge. The attainment of this new level of psychological development includes a certain degree of ... detachment from one's emotions. One certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it, yet at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the affect, a consciousness which regards the affect as an object, and can say 'I know that I suffer'. All this, Storr is the first to admit, is very general. No example is given by Jung of the insoluble problem which must be outgrown or resolved at a symbolic level but, in fact, Jung might have found in Wordsworth's Prelude a working model for that evolution of a higher consciousness in response to an apparently intolerable conflict. The last books of the poem worry and circle and ruminate in an effort to discover what had happened to him in the 1790s when a passion for liberty and human regeneration, embodied for Wordsworth in the fact of the French Revolution, came into conflict with other essential constituents of his being founded upon the land and love of England. When England declared war upon Revolutionary France, Wordsworth experienced a crisis of unanticipated intensity which he sought to allay first by addressing himself to the higher reality of Godwin's philosophy and, when that failed, by recourse to a renewed and deepened myth of nature and the human heart. But the crisis itself is described with dramatic power: I felt the ravage of this most unnatural strife In my own heart; there it lay like a weight, At enmity with the tenderest springs Of my enjoyments. I, who with the breeze Had played, green leaf on the blessed tree Of my beloved country--nor had wished For happier fortune than to wither there-- Now from my pleasant station was cut off, And tossed about in whirlwinds. I rejoiced, Yes, afterwards, truth painful to record, Exulted in the triumph of my soul When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown, Left without glory on the field, or driven, Brave hearts, to shameful flight. It was a grief-- Grief call it not, 'twas any thing but that-- A conflict of sensations without name, Of which he only who may love the sight Of a village steeple as I do can judge, When in the congregation, bending To their great Father, prayers were offered up Or praises for our country's victories, And, 'mid the simple worshippers perchance I only, like an uninvited guest Whom no one owned, sate silent--shall I add, Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come! …