W O R D S W O RTALEXANDER
H AND INFA
FREER
NCY
ALEXANDER FREER
Wordsworth and the Infancy
of Affection
All the new thinking is about loss.
—Robert Hass1
1
ordsworth’s “ode: intimations of immortality from recollections of Early Childhood” contrasts its speaker’s current existence
W
with the recollections of infancy 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 origins: impossible because the representation of infant experience is undermined 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 infancy 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, succeeds in “deriving gain from the felt reality of loss,” but it does not suppose
a calculation of overall proªt or loss.2 My aim is to substantiate an “ambivalent” 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 Blasing’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 Conti1. 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 Function of Memory,” The Wordsworth Circle 1, no. 2 (Spring 1970): 41.
SiR, 54 (Spring 2015)
79
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ALEXANDER FREER
nuity is possible, I will argue, through discontinuity: the lost affects of
infancy that momentarily return, transªgured, in adult life.
To this end, I will also question an assumption of some more recent accounts of the “Ode” which assert determinate narratives. John Beer suggests 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 tradition of Helen Vendler, to paint the “Ode” as poetic and intellectual progress.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 of questionbegging 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 of Poetry,” in The
Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, eds. James Chandler and Maureen N.
McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 144.
5. Ross, “Seeking a Way Home: The Uncanny in Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode,’”
SEL, 1500–1900 32, no. 4 (1992): 625.
6. Vendler, “Lionel Trilling and the Immortality Ode,” Salmagundi 41 (1978): 69.
7. Taylor, “Religious Readings of the Immortality Ode,” SEL, 1500–1900 26, no. 4
(1986): 633–34.
8. Vendler, “Lionel Trilling,” 81.
9. William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared R.
WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y
81
poem depends on two antagonistic claims: that something “heavenly” from
before infancy is necessarily lost (not just renounced), and that in spite of,
even because of, this loss, mature life is shaped by infant experience; there
is a continuity of the soul. Where the two claims intersect is not a contradiction so much as a telling absence.
Infancy, as its etymology implies, occurs prior to the genesis of a speaking voice and of an “I” who speaks. The poem contends that infancy is also
closer to a prior heavenly existence, the memory of which will fade as the
infant develops. This proximity legitimates research into infant experience,
but the fading forecloses the completion of that research. What is lost in
maturity appears only through a negation: “The things which I have seen I
now can see no more” (9). I want to suggest that the loss charted by the
“Ode” is intimately connected to the “I have seen.” There is something
about saying “I” which marks the speaker as having fallen away from “celestial light” and “blessèd creatures” into a world of mediated experience,
because the “I” is the opposite of the oceanic existence of infancy. To put
it another way, what has been lost is impossible to represent in the form of
“I sensed x,” because a precondition of using the “I” is the separation from
the world of immediacy. Thus, poetry that would speak of “the growth of
a poet’s mind” must speak of what it cannot represent. What is produced is
poetry that knows its descriptive task is, in the last analysis, impossible. Yet
the loss is bearable—writing is still possible—because the poetry can invoke the minimal, phenomenological continuity between infancy and
adulthood: singular, momentary feelings of joy that together make up a history of affective life, the “almost physical” continuity of the soul. In the
next section, I make my case for this reading; in the one following, I consider the changing relation of speaker to world via a critique of James
Chandler’s position; and ªnally, I consider some more general implications
for reading Wordsworth’s poetry.
2
In lyric poetry, Mutlu Konuk Blasing contends, the saying of “I” is not
simply given; it charts the developmental journey of an individual who began life speechless. She writes:
We need to consider the special status of the mother tongue and the
lived history of the transformation of random muscular and sonic phenomena into recognizable elements of a sign system. This ªrst stage of
Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 271, lines 1, 3–4. Line numbers from this edition will be cited hereafter within the text.
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ALEXANDER FREER
language acquisition makes for an individuating emotional history
in language. . . . [P]oetry returns to that history of seduction and discipline into language.10
Poetry is implicated in “that history of ‘forgetfulness’” in which the original, pre-linguistic experience of the world is renounced for the world of
signs. But while this original state is given up and “forgotten,” we also fail
to forget entirely: words remain haunted by the violence of their origin,
and “the remainder that cannot be represented in verbal language.”11
Blasing skillfully orients lyric poetry towards the personal historicity of a
speaker, demonstrating the affective journey that all language (and lyric
above all) remembers but cannot step outside in order to observe. Poetry
and infancy are antagonistic, because to speak at all is to speak against infancy. Yet, they are also inseparable: words have power over us precisely
because they had to be painfully acquired.
Beginning with language acquisition (or rather some putative point of
non-language directly before), Blasing’s history skips from the beginning of
life directly to this moment of linguistic encounter. The risk is that the development of the infant qua autonomous being is collapsed into the individuating operation of the personal pronoun which becomes Blasing’s
“lyric I.” To be clear, this is not a criticism of Blasing’s project in its own
terms, but I want to expand the scope and reach further back to Freud’s
conception of the “I.” It is not only the speaking subject that is implicated
in lyric language but also the possibility of a subject as such.
There is a tension in Blasing’s study between her psychohistorical account of language acquisition and mainstream psychoanalytic theory. Perhaps because her conclusions can sound rather Freudian at times—regarding the power of infant experience to shape adult life, and in her reading
language for signs of a forgotten history—she is careful to distance her
study from Freud. “What Freudian theory represses,” she contends, “is the
history of the transformation of animal sounds to symbolic language.”12
The weakness of the psychoanalytic framework, on this reading, is that
while it detects erotic life operating at the level of language, its stakes are
fundamentally symbolic. It comprehends erotic life’s subversion of language through puns, accidental portmanteaus and parapraxes; its axes of
language are condensation and displacement. In short, psychoanalysis as10. Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007), 46–47.
11. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 47–48.
12. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 62; cf. also her comment on Freud’s 1923 essay, “The Ego and
the Id,” 60.
WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y
83
sumes the tyranny of the signiªer (Lacan’s use of structural linguistics is the
paradigmatic case). The clear problem for Blasing is that if the unconscious
is “structured like a language,” as Lacan’s slogan goes, the structuring has
always already happened, without proper examination.13
Yet psychoanalysis (including Lacanian) has much to say about the extrasymbolic aspects of language (stammers, coughs, muteness, screams, an untimely case of the hiccups), not to mention other communicative registers:
the gaze, touch, tone, and so on. Blasing’s criticism is perhaps more relevant regarding how psychoanalysis has been appropriated in literary studies
as a “strategy” of reading poems. Her dismissal of Freud’s own work as unthinkingly symbolic, however, seems to mistake the preconscious (which is
“structured like a language,” or at least oriented towards language) for
Freud’s model of the subject as such.
The salient point for my purposes is this: Freud’s “I” (or “ego,” in the
Latinized jargon of his English translator, James Strachey) is not a linguistic
structure. Indeed, it is a prior condition for language: an internal conception of an “I” must be in place before one can coherently speak as an “I.”
We can extend Blasing’s history of the “lyric I” by asking how one might
come to identify as an “I” at all.
In his 1914 paper “On Narcissism,” Freud encounters a problem of origins when trying to determine the beginnings of narcissistic pleasure. Speciªcally, if narcissism resides in self-pleasure (ego-pleasure, we might say),
how does it begin? It cannot be the default position. Just as the “raw” can
only follow the “cooked,” self-pleasure only makes sense in contrast to
object-pleasure. Narcissism assumes a self/world distinction in which object choices exist, including oneself. In Freud’s “economic” terms, narcissism is the libidinal investment of the ego qua object-choice; it is a selfbinding of libido (versus an “external investment”). Freud realizes that narcissism should thus be differentiated from (unbound) bodily pleasure as
such—that is, auto-eroticism. What the distinction reveals is the falsehood
of assuming the “I” or ego to be a natural or spontaneous development:
[W]e are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot
exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed. The
auto-erotic instincts, however, are there from the very ªrst; so there
must be something added to auto-eroticism—a new psychical action—in
order to bring about narcissism.14
13. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New
York: Norton, 2002), 737.
14. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914),” in The Standard Edition of
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ALEXANDER FREER
The “new psychical action” is not deªned by Freud, although various theorists have proposed solutions. What is at stake, as Elizabeth Grosz notes, is
“the relative stabilization of the circulation of libido in the child’s body,
so that the division between subject and object (even the subject’s capacity
to take itself as an object) becomes possible for the ªrst time.”15 The acquisition of the linguistic “I,” while certainly a vast step in development, must
be preceded by a more fundamental adaptation: the basic self/other distinction, or, the psychogenesis of self. The pre-ego infant experiences pleasure
in its pure immediacy, outside what Winnicott calls the “me” and “notme.”16 In the polymorphous perversity of auto-eroticism, excitation is possible in any part of the body and across the whole sensory manifold. It is
misleading to speak of “engagement” with the world, not because the infant is a monad, but quite the opposite: because he has no sense of “self ” to
distinguish from the world, there only is excitation.
It is difªcult to appreciate how alien this world is to ours: not merely experience before language (intangible enough) but experience prior to an
assumption of subject and object; nothing but the immediate, affective experiences of pleasure and pain, felt indiscriminately across the whole sensorium. This resembles the pre-worldly life of the infant in the “Ode” insofar as an “immortal sea” suggests the complete absence of boundaries,
and a world without discrete objects. What I want to suggest is that the
speaker’s transition from heaven to earth can be productively understood as
analogous to the formation of the ego. The “sleep and forgetting” would,
therefore, be of the sensuous immediacy only possible prior to the mental
boundary between self and world.
The premise of the “Ode” is that the speaker has been estranged from
the experience of early childhood (and heaven before that), but still faintly
recollects it. Like Blasing’s account of the entry into language, the transition necessitates loss:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere it’s setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 14 (1914–1916), ed. and trans. James
Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 76–77; my emphases.
15. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994), 32.
16. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971), 2.
WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y
85
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
(58–66)
The weight of these lines rests on the initial rupture more than the subsequent amnesia. It is not merely the presence of an almost-remembered
dream, like an unreachable itch. This almost-memory is glorious. There is a
rich, sensuous content given to infant experience (the “celestial light”),
which is quite unlike adult, mediated experiences of the world. Rather
than a lost physical substance, “light” suggests a change in the way the
world is seen: in its phenomenal qualities. If a “new psychical action” is to
account for such “a sleep and a forgetting,” it too must be sensuously rich.
For these reasons, I want to consider the psychogenesis of the self as a
bounded object, not just in terms of the acquisition of language (which, as
discussed, already assumes a self/world distinction, without which the notion of communication is incoherent). Lacan’s theory of the “mirror stage”
does just this in the visual register, providing a quasi-Hegelian account in
which infants identify with their mirror images, and then with themselves
as individuals through the individuated “imago.” But, bearing in mind the
condition I imposed for sensuous content, I turn instead to Didier Anzieu’s
concept of the “skin ego.”
The skin ego, Anzieu suggests, is an ur-ego: an early psychical appreciation of oneself as a bounded object, which rests on the subject’s growing
physical awareness of the skin as envelope or container. The physical envelope is, of course, “there from the start” in healthy newborns, but the psychical equivalent must be developed. It is because “as Freud allusively remarks, touch is the only one of the ªve external senses which possesses a
reºexive structure” that the skin is especially disposed to suggest a psychic
“inside” and “outside.”17 Thus:
When the baby is . . . held in the mother’s arms and pressed against
her body, whose warmth, smell and movements it feels; it is picked
up, manipulated, rubbed, washed and caressed, all this usually amidst a
ºood of words and humming. . . . These activities lead the child progressively to differentiate a surface which has both an inner and an
outer face, in other words, an interface, permitting a distinction between inside and outside.18
The infant, for Anzieu, is bombarded with affection across the whole sensorium, but the skin, due to its special reºexive status, is the biological sub17. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989),
61.
18. Anzieu, Skin Ego, 36–37.
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ALEXANDER FREER
strate, which a notion of individuality ªrst “leans on” (anaclisis, in
Strachey’s Latin). Before any possible (transitional) objects emerge, the relationship with the caring adult takes a tragic form: it is love, expressed in
touching, stroking, swaddling, and holding, which brings about the ªrst
alienation of the infant from the world. The actions of the carer, which express the (desired) affective unity of adult and child, also conªrm their
physical disunity. Through the constant stimulation, the “intra-uterine
phantasy” of non-contact gives way (except for the profoundly autistic) “to
the phantasy of a common skin” in which skin-sensations are related by the
infant to the supposed unity of infant and carer through touch. Thanks to its
reºexive nature, touch conªrms the carer’s presence at the cost of
conªrming the gap between them. Since the carer never utterly surrounds
the infant (unlike the sea, or the womb), her or his presence is temporary.
Their separation is permanent. What follows in typical infants is “the suppression of this [fantasy of ] common skin and the recognition that each has
his or her own skin, a recognition which does not come about without resistance and pain.”19 The development of the skin-ego, the very ªrst step
towards selfhood, comes about with the waning of fantasies of enclosure,
perpetual care, and unlimited contact. Moreover, the positing of the self
who can relate to objects, and indeed the self who can speak, is the ªrst
alienation from those objects: “the object, like the word, is born out of the
distance from us that we have to resign ourselves to allow it to assume.”20
Here we see an instance of the thoroughly Wordsworthian character of
much psychoanalytic theory. Not only does Freud insist “the child is father
of the man,” but Anzieu practically asserts: “heaven lies about us in our infancy!” Anzieu’s early development narrative runs close to Wordsworth’s
verse narratives. Not only in the “Ode,” where “the Babe leaps up on his
Mother’s arm,” but also in the lexically related passage in The Prelude
which begins “Bless’d be the infant Babe,” where “by intercourse of touch /
I held mute dialogues with my Mother’s heart.”21 In the 1799 text, second
part, this passage begins:
Bless’d the infant Babe
(For with my best conjectures I would trace
The progress of our being) blest the Babe
Nursed in his Mother’s arms, the Babe who sleeps
19. Anzieu, Skin Ego, 63.
20. Jacques André, “The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu),” trans. Richard B. Simpson,
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2006): 571.
21. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798–1799, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1977), 62, lines 312–13; my emphasis. Line numbers from this edition will
be cited hereafter within the text.
WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y
87
Upon his Mother’s breast, who when his soul
Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul
Doth gather passion from his Mother’s eye!
(267–73)
The connection is made again between the “Babe,” his mother’s arms, and
joy. The blessed infant is physically separate from his mother, but his “soul”
still “claims manifest kindred.” Translating “soul” as “psyche” (or vice
versa) is not without precedent, and if we do so there is an obvious similarity to Anzieu. Isn’t the fantasy of common skin an assertion of the shared
psychic entity of a sensuous manifold, a related soul? But Wordsworth analyzes the scene further than Anzieu, recognizing that nursing involves two:
the fantasy of commonality is not the spontaneous response to being born
and nursed, which Anzieu sometimes implies, but rather a response to the
desire already present in the caring adult, who him- or herself recalls and
believes in infant “glory” (as does the speaker of the “Ode”). To put it another way, all the love and fantasy Anzieu ascribes to the infant can also be
traced back to the carer: “the Babe . . . Doth gather passion from his
Mother’s eye!”22 Taking a less uniformly “adult” perspective than the
“Ode,” the subsequent passage of The Prelude understands separation as a
source of wonder and possibility. In the Freudian notion of “leaning on,”
sexual pleasure ªrst cohabits with biological function, but comes to exist
independently (oral eroticism outlasts breastfeeding). Wordsworth articulates a notion of “leaning” in the language of affection:
I was left alone
Seeking this visible world, nor knowing why:
The props of my affections were removed
And yet the building stood as if sustained
By its own spirit.
(322–26)
“As if ” carries a great deal of weight here. It suggests both that the mature
affections have origins (the fundamental claim of the “Ode”) and that the
house of consciousness is not reducible to its foundations. A ªxation on
the former leads to crude, mechanistic Freudianism, the latter to egoistic
and naïve assertions of self-sufªciency. At his ªnest, Wordsworth achieves
this difªcult balance in his efforts to “trace the progress of our being.”
The “Bless’d be the infant Babe” passage directly follows The Prelude’s
22. This is also the move made by Jean Laplanche in New Foundations: the infant pleasure
at the breast, so beloved by psychoanalysis, mirrors the adult pleasure in the contact of lips
and skin.
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ALEXANDER FREER
musing on “the history and birth of each / As of a single independent
thing” (260–61). Together, Anzieu and Blasing provide a psycho-historical
account of just this. Firstly, there is the physical birth, in which the infant is
literally separated from a larger being.23 Secondly, there is the formation of
the ego, initially in the form of a skin ego, later in the other sensory registers (for brevity I will focus only on this moment of ego-genesis). The skin
ego institutes a primitive self/other distinction, demoting oceanic autoeroticism and the “shared skin” of caregiver and child from phenomenal
actuality into latent fantasy. Following the acquisition of the ego, or selfhood, there is language acquisition, which compounds the “history of forgetfulness,” both through further disciplining of the body (vocal control
recalls sphincter control) and a psychic development: acquiring a predeªned semantic system. “The institution of the symbolic function rests on
infantile amnesia,” Blasing comments.24 This account is also the story of
how pure sensuous immediacy is left behind. By temporalizing the acquisition of selfhood, self and non-self objects, the most basic assumption of an
“I,” are not merely given, but rather the products of a development that is
both a gain (of the “I”) and a loss (of oceanic immediacy).
If the “Ode” recalls a time of free-moving libido and pure sensuous immediacy, it explains why it is necessarily true that “the things which I have
seen I now can see no more.” Hence all sense-impressions now seem to be
missing an intangible quality:
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.
(10–18)
The “celestial light” and “glory” of infancy cannot be captured or represented by the speaker, only their loss is registered. The smells and colors
and warmth that once overpowered now merely please. Sensation is “lost”
in the sense of something foreclosed, rather than misplaced; it is his being a
speaker (an “I,” a user of language) that prevents the speaker’s return to infant sensation. Hence, “the things which I have seen” in the “adult” under23. Noted in Beer, Wordsworth in Time, 111.
24. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 47–48.
WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y
89
standing of “things” never existed: infant sensations cannot be found by
looking for lost objects in adult life. By ªguring his loss as an aura or
“glory,” the speaker suggests as much. It is not the object that escapes, but
the experience of the object.
There are additional beneªts of the reading I propose. First, the psychoanalytic attention to early human sensation reminds us that infant experience is no less real than mature experience of the world of objects. It is less
differentiated and structured, but more vivid and present. However comforting it might be for some modern critics to equate Wordsworth’s “soul
talk” with infant fantasy, to be relinquished in favor of “reality,” the
equation is inaccurate. Secondly, this reading allows the poem to act as a
corrective to the temptation in psychoanalysis after Freud to naturalize the
split between subject and object (or ego and world) from the outset, which
Laplanche calls “the closing-in-on-itself of the Freudian psychical system,
its monadological character.”25 By naturalizing the “I,” its status as a compromise-formation (and therefore the loss inherent to any compromise) can
be diminished or overlooked. This is a psychoanalytic equivalent to the
“progressive” reading of the “Ode,” whereby infant loss can be mitigated
by adult achievement. Hence, I will address James Chandler’s recent reading of the poem, which makes just this claim.
3
In contrast to what I suggested was a false equivalence (or a false “choice”)
between infancy and adulthood, as I read the poem, infant experience persists in adult life as an absence, and this transªguration is structurally necessary. This has implications when we consider the conclusions the speaker
reaches by the end of the poem.
Infancy and adulthood are sufªciently different that for the adult who
speaks and writes there is no indication that “getting back the object” of
infant experience would be satisfying, even if it were possible. What the
child of the poem knows, and the speaker comes to realize, is that there is
no weighing of the options, and no choice involved in development (any
more than one chooses autism and womb-return fantasies). However glorious it was, there is no going back. The speaker initially frames infant development as a “seduction” by the earth, but eventually comes to understand
it as a necessary part of adult experience. Indeed, the speaker is forced to
abandon his fantasy of a return to infant wisdom not least because he recognizes that the child strives for development. “Earth ªlls her lap with pleasures of her own,” and the child pursues it.
25. Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, trans. Luke Thurston, Leslie Hill, and Philip
Slotkin (London: Routledge, 1999), 83.
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ALEXANDER FREER
Thus Chandler is correct to describe the child’s pursuit of the world of
adult custom as “a deep expression of dissatisfaction with the merely sensual order of the world.”26 Unburdened by nostalgia, the child appreciates
what the speaker must come to appreciate: that mere (infant) sensation is
radically insufªcient to one who is an “I.” The speaker’s desire to return to
early infant pleasure would be thoroughly disappointing if it were magically realized. It may help to recall the frustrations of Sense Certainty in
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: in pure sensuous certainty, consciousness
supposes itself to have the richest and most immediate comprehension of
the world, but whenever it tries to represent or declare the contents of its
comprehension, they slip away.27 What is “right here” ceases to be in the
instant the claim is made, and the “here” and “now” reveals itself to be an
empty structure, “a simple plurality of Heres . . . a simple plurality of
Nows.”28 Without the use of properties, qualities, or other mediating
structures, “the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language.”29
There is no experience, however rich, that will ªx the structural problem
posed by representation. Because the advocate of Sense Certainty is, unlike
the pre-ego infant, already an “I,” it desires to represent its experience (to
its future self, to others), which is only to say it desires to form sentences
that include the ªrst-person pronoun. And this is precisely what it cannot
do using only Sense Certainty, regardless of how wonderful or striking
any particular sensation might be. Being an “I,” a world of sensuous immediacy is always already lost; not because the object goes anywhere, but because in the presence of an “I,” immediate experience becomes thin and
superªcial.
The “I” of the Phenomenology has its own character: it will utterly commit to each position along its way (the assertions of sense certainty, perception, force and understanding, and so on). This is not so in Wordsworth; as
Hartman notes, “there is always a reserve in the experiences Wordsworth
depicts.”30 The “I” of the Phenomenology can abandon sensuous certainty
(and each subsequent position) because Hegel’s dialectics assume the “external” mediation of everything internal to the subject:
[T]he attempts of the individual to understand the universal as a
scheme, property or feeling within itself, are constantly subverted by
26. Chandler, “Wordsworth’s Great Ode,” 150.
27. I am indebted in my reading of the Phenomenology to Jay Bernstein’s Berkeley lecture
series on the text.
28. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1977), 64.
29. Hegel, Phenomenology, 66.
30. Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen, 1987), 10.
WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y
91
the demonstration that any internalised universal is already the product
of an activity in relation to an external world.31
There is no nostalgia for previous relations to the world because each relation is fully sublated by the next. Nothing is lost from the self, because everything taken to be internal and ªxed is revealed to be external and transformable. For Wordsworth, feeling is internal; this is one of the basic
premises of the “Ode.” Each person has an individual history of feeling,
but that feeling is not reducible to the general progression of history. Or, in
other words, what we feel becomes part of who we are. Hence nostalgia is
possible. There is no clean sublation of infant experience in adult existence
in Wordsworth as there is in the transition from Sense Certainty to Self
Consciousness. Chandler is quite correct about the child’s dissatisfaction
with infant experience (in other words, the poem’s nostalgia is neither total
nor stable). Yet his conclusion is too Hegelian for Wordsworth. Chandler
continues, “we are encouraged to read [‘endless imitation’] as a reference
to poetic imitation, to mimesis in the Aristotelian sense.”32 The “progress”
from infant to adult is, on this reading, a precondition of poetry, and thus
implicitly advocated by the poem’s existence. Indeed, the speaker strays toward irony when he upbraids the child for his love of representation over
sensation, when his speech is itself the engine of poesis.
There is as much difªculty with Chandler’s reading of the “Ode” as a
poem of progress as with the readings of decline he overcomes, however.
Vendler rightly objects to the willful misreading necessary for Trilling’s
claim that the poem “matures” into an entirely naturalistic second half.33
Similarly, Chandler must dismiss large (nostalgic) parts of the “Ode” as
“false starts” in order to assert that the poem constitutes “sentimental progress.”34 This is the problematic “Hegelian” move: to assume that what is
later fully overcomes and encompasses what is prior; the dialectic leaves no
remainder. The problem is that adult “custom” is not the unequivocally
positive substitute for infant “glory” that such a reading requires. As I have
been arguing, it is not a substitute at all. To Chandler’s advantage, by the
end of his essay, his question has changed to cultural progress, and
the difªcult issue of human development has been elided.
To underscore the problem, I turn back to Chandler’s discussion of the
“Ode” in Wordsworth’s Second Nature. In his narrative, previous critics have
overlooked the appeal of Burke to the young Wordsworth on a rhetorical
31. Matt Ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 148.
32. Chandler, “Wordsworth’s Great Ode,” 144–45.
33. Vendler, “Lionel Trilling,” 28.
34. Chandler, “Wordsworth’s Great Ode,” 147, 152.
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ALEXANDER FREER
and aesthetic level. Thus Wordsworth’s turn to a Burkean political position
on the Revolution, “somewhere between 1793 and 1818” was a return.35
A Burkean veneration of custom (sometimes ªgured as “second nature”) is
detected by Chandler in practically the entire Wordsworthian corpus. To
ªt the “Ode” into this narrative, Chandler designates the poem’s opposition to custom as “mistaken views” to be corrected by a “recovery” in
these lines:
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!36
The seamless move from the evasive, “fugitive,” living feeling “that Nature
yet remembers” to Chandler’s contention that it is remembered by “the
force of habit” requires serious sleight of hand on Chandler’s part: he reads
“custom with a weight” as “some part of ourselves [that] remains out of
our own reach, beyond our intellectual tampering,” that relies instead on
an understanding of life deep almost as custom.37 The selective reading
Chandler is forced to do demonstrates how hard he must push against a
poem whose parts “[stand] energetically in permanent contradiction.”38 If
the speaker does come to embrace the “philosophic mind,” it is not because it marks a departure from earlier life, but because he recognizes that
such philosophy will be precisely the “labor of the negative,” which afªrms
life’s continuity through the ongoing relation with what has been lost.
Even in “years that bring the philosophic mind,” there is no repudiation of
beginnings (189). “The innocent brightness of a new-born Day / Is lovely
yet” (197–98).
4
Language, as the symbolic relation of self to other, conªrms the loss of oceanic existence. “A word is elegy to what it signiªes,”39 and words are an
elegy to the pure immediacy they foreclose. “Elegy” because words pay
distant homage: their individual forms, the phonemes, stresses, and modulations, are complex derivations from an initial moment in which sound—
tears, laughter, sheer noise—is the actualization of pure, unmediated affect.
35. James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984), 30.
36. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, 79–80.
37. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature, 80–81.
38. Jeffrey C. Robinson, “The Immortality Ode: Lionel Trilling and Helen Vendler,”
The Wordsworth Circle 12, no. 1 (1981): 69.
39. Hass, Praise, 4.
WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y
93
The sense that words miss their objects is especially important in the
“Ode” because the objects of early infant experience are only possible to
describe through negation. On the reading I am suggesting, their existence
as objects only emerges retroactively: from the “adult” perspective, which
supposes the world to be composed of subjects and objects. This perspective is evident in the very assumption that affection cannot act intransitively, that a feeling always requires an object. The lost object emerges
from our non-identity with what we were.
“While we think of memory as an active faculty, we are rarely apt to
consider it in its negative or premonitory form,” Sperry contends.40 Is a
“negative memory” a memory at all? Can one forget, and yet by remembering that instance of forgetting, remain conscious of the thing that was
forgotten? Sperry “seems at times to want Wordsworth to have it both
ways.”41 I wonder if the “paradox” is made more difªcult than necessary by
Sperry’s insistence on explaining the phenomenon through memory. In an
early compositional fragment of The Prelude, Wordsworth speaks of “the
time of unrememberable being.”42 If a notion of an “unrememberable”
past persists in the “Ode,” too, it would explain how experiences could
both pass away and remain present: there is experience that both affects us
and exceeds our powers of memory. A “negative memory” could be better
understood as the point at which memory’s limitation comes to the fore:
the “Fallings from us, vanishings” which the “Ode” insists upon (146).
Perhaps Sperry’s explanation is difªcult because “luminous traces engraved
upon the memory” recall the Freudian vocabulary of the “memory
trace.”43 Freud’s system requires a subsystem that keeps such traces concealed from consciousness. For Wordsworth, it is “ªrst affections” which
persist. They would, therefore, be “shadowy” not because of repression,
but because their objects emerge retroactively: in an unrememberable past
at which they can only hint.
Discussing sound in Wallace Stevens, Blasing writes: “we are alien to the
language that produces us as subjects and unspeakably intimate with it. It
speaks in our mouths.”44 To say that language produces the subject summons
the sort of psychoanalysis with which Blasing claims disagreement; Lacan
assigns just such extraordinary agency to language with his slogan: “a signiªer is what represents a subject to another signiªer.”45 But the claim
holds for Blasing as well: as sounds, and as bodily articulations, words echo
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
Sperry, “From ‘Tintern Abbey’ to the ‘Intimations Ode,’” 44.
Johnston, “Recollecting Forgetting,” 60.
MS. JJ., reproduced in Wordsworth, The Prelude, 115.
Sperry, “From ‘Tintern Abbey’ to the ‘Intimations Ode,’” 48.
Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 138.
Lacan, Écrits, 694.
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ALEXANDER FREER
the sensuous history of our becoming speaking beings. Language has forgotten or suppressed its original, emotional content, transforming from
pure feeling into a system of signiªcation. Like Wordsworth, who realizes
that the past never passes away entirely, Blasing suggests that in poetry we
can ªnd the overlooked noise and difªculty of origins. Lyric Poetry is deeply
Romantic in its own right. It pulls its poets (Eliot, Stevens, Pound, Sexton)
back into their verse. Blasing’s readings long for what cannot be read, the
inchoate and pre-poetic subjectivity, which is forever falling away in her
studies into modernist intertextuality, language games, and personae.
The difªculty of any programmatic attempt to read like this is palpable.
The notion of an unconscious (be it Freudian repression or Wordsworthian
“sleep and forgetting”) posits the same problem for comprehending psychological causality. Wordsworth makes the point elegantly: “Who that
shall point as with a wand and say, / This portion of the river of my mind /
Came from yon fountain?” (247–49). Just before The Prelude (1799, ªrst
part) begins to trace the infant Babe’s origins with “best conjectures,” the
speaker cautions that it is a
Hard task to analyse a soul in which
Not only general habits and desires
But each most obvious and particular thought,
Not in a mystical and idle sense
But in the words of reason deeply weighed,
Hath no beginning.
(262–67)
There is “no beginning,” the line about “the river of my mind” suggests,
in the sense of speciªc origins. There is the scene of mother and infant,
wordless, affective, and complex, and with obvious, deªnite origins, but
not ones we could subdivide and “point [to] as with a wand.” And if we
take the “Ode” at its word, the soul too has no earthly beginning, it “cometh from afar.” A criticism which may be leveled at Blasing’s theory is that
its practical application is procedurally self-defeating. Any attempt to ªnd
(and speak about) the residue of pre-language within language will end in
performative contradiction; either you don’t ªnd what you were looking
for, or worse, you do, and thus you must have missed the object entirely.
Since language acquisition brings about the “history of forgetting,” in the
end, our language is all we have left of it. The poem speaks, but because it
does, it cannot speak of how it ever came to do so.
In contrast to Blasing’s reading of Anne Sexton’s self-effacement, where
“the unconscious and the ‘soul’ are being redeªned . . . as residual effects of
the material medium training the body to its tune,” for Wordsworth residual effects are no epiphenomenon of language—the unconscious, spirit,
WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y
95
soul—these terms describe what in Wordsworth stretches back before
words, before that split into self and other.46 If there is a “residual effect,” it
is that the soul has been shaped by, and oriented towards, affection, even as
the origins of the ªrst affections recede.
Picking up Freud’s poetic term, W. R. Bion asks of analysis, “how is one
to penetrate this obstacle, this caesura of birth?”47 In verse as much as in
clinical analysis, the obstacle is not the absence of determination, but its
surfeit. To take an example from a later couplet from the “Ode,” there are
multiple layers of interpretation for a single syllable:
And oh ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Think not of any severing of our loves!
(190–91)
The “O” is a demand, a little prayer. It suggests the speaker’s unease with
his previous insistence that “we will grieve not,” as he requests continued
love. The cry functions as an invocation to nature, recalling the invocation
to the Muses in poetic tradition. Metrically, in combination with the
“and,” the “O” ensures the line scans as ªve iambs, and aligns it with
the previous pentameter. It is also a kind of spoken caesura, a vowelsounded break before “ye Fountains” can do their work; it is the kind of
break one might make if surprised and interrupted by a vision of the fountains and meadows. Not fountains and meadows as mere scenery, but as
part of one’s own existence, an existence that now seems more and more
independent (and lonely) with age, save for in occasional, glorious moments when nature still appears speechlessly wonderful: moments when
we might say “O!” Wordsworth “will not acknowledge that the bond
with nature—more psychic than epistemic—is broken,” Hartman writes.48
The “O” makes a temporal break before the fountains, but also reinforces
the psychological break that has occurred: just as the mother’s touch is only
possible because of the child’s estrangement: the line itself is premised on its
own alienation from nature. It speaks to the severance it is pleading against.
There is a tragic sense that loss has already occurred, and every poetic effort
to prevent it only makes it worse. Insofar as these lines protest against the
immovable, they recall the aggrieved mother in “The Thorn,” Martha
Ray, whose repeated cry Peter McDonald calls “the poem’s most secure
fact”: “Oh misery! Oh misery / O woe is me! Oh misery!”49
46. Blasing, Lyric Poetry, 190.
47. Bion, Two Papers: “The Grid” and “Caesura” (London: Karnac, 1989), 45, my emphasis.
48. Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, 160.
49. McDonald, Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 63.
96
ALEXANDER FREER
The language of the “Ode” speaks to both the impossibility of reading
origins with any sense of ªnality, and the necessity of doing so nevertheless,
for in that “O” remains the intimation of “shadowy” affection “[w]hich
neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, / Nor Man nor Boy, / Nor all that
is at enmity with joy, / Can utterly abolish or destroy!” (160–63). If we allow that origins stretch back further than language, there is another way to
ªgure poetic overdetermination, however: not as a failure to signify clearly,
but as a special capacity to hold multiple (and sometimes antagonistic)
meanings together—to connect present and absent things. Temporal and
visual breaks invite our anticipation; lines murmur their tonal and rhythmic
imitations of one another; a syllable’s multiple suggestions hang in the air:
there are moments when all these intimations seem as solid as valleys and
trees. Rather than posing a problem, such effects offer a solution; only because a poem’s possibilities exceed conscious and determinate comprehension can it “be the dream of which we are the sleep.”50
The Wordsworthian soul, with all its affective intensity, is not, like Sexton’s, a linguistic ghost. Its work, its evidence, if souls can have evidence,
is in the singular moments of beauty and shock that recall a time when
“every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparell’d in celestial light.”
That these moments can recur in adult life suggests that there has been no
“severing of our loves.” These moments recur for Wordsworth’s own
characters. They demonstrate the same excessive perception, becoming
ªxated or overcome by simple objects. Mark Hewson points to the
“distinctive gesture that reappears in a number of Wordsworth’s narrative
poems . . . the description of an isolated, unremarkable, even dismal object.” We might think of Martha Ray’s thorn, Simon Lee’s mattock,
and the heap of stones in “Michael.”51 So too in the “Ode,” objects which
“should” seem trivial or straightforward are sometimes overpowering. The
meanest ºower can signify more than is expressible. The feeling is unexplainable because the “glorious” scene it recalls and draws upon is unrememberable. We encounter what Erik Gray calls “the trope of exceptionality”: the act of marking out or excluding a single instance from the
common. He contends:
The trope very neatly combines two great Romantic preoccupations:
detailed observation of nature and sympathy with natural phenomena
(since the solitary poet is implicitly equated with the exceptional bird
50. Henri Meschonnic, “Rhyme and Life,” trans. Gabriella Bedetti, Critical Inquiry 15,
no. 1 (1988): 90.
51. Hewson, “The Scene of Meditation in Wordsworth,” Modern Language Review 106,
no. 4 (2011): 954.
WO R D S WO RT H A N D I N FA N C Y
97
or beetle or breeze); and imaginative expansion—the mind’s ability, in
the absence of sensory information, to ªgure forth an alternate
world.52
It is no surprise, then, that in Chandler’s reading of the “Ode,” he misses
the strange exceptionality or haecceity of the pansy, subsuming its aura in
the “depth” of custom, stretching his deªnition of custom (now seemingly
responsible for things we cannot share and repeat) in the process.
The “Ode” proposes a distinct, psychological reading of origins, one that
is both affectively rich and also subject to a form of Romantic deferral.
Origins always slip away from us in the last analysis because part of thinking
about origins is acknowledging their disappearance. The “Ode” suggests
what we might call a Wordsworthian unconscious, one of “sleep and forgetting,” composed not of repressed representations, but lost affects. But if
the lost object of infant experience conªrms our estrangement from our
past, its gentle or forceful after-shocks conªrm our lingering connection.
The “almost physical continuity” is found not in memories, but in the moments when memory lacks explanatory capacity: in disproportionate and
unexplainable reactions to particular objects and in the ongoing sensitivity
of the soul to the emergence of those powerful feelings that also seem to
“cometh from afar.” Present feelings echo the ªrst feelings which, although
shadowy and incomprehensible, “Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
/ Are yet a master light of all our seeing” (154–55). They hint at a world
before ours precisely because they appear as unrememberable gaps and lost
objects. A personal history of experience stretches all the way back to its
origin in the wordless sensations that constitute phenomenal existence as
such: a soul, a life, the energy and joy and pain whose beginning is forever
melting away, even as it lends verse its power.
Christ’s College, University of Cambridge
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