Wordsworth and the Immortality Ode: 'The Surface of Past Time'.
Wordsworth's Immortality Ode laments his loss of a oneness with nature which he remembers from childhood. The essay interrogates the poem's equivocal representations of this elegiac strain, and then explores its immediate bibliographical context in the 1807 volume in which it was first published. Th...
| Publicado en: | Romanticism Vol. 31; no. 2; pp. 123 - 136 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Edinburgh University Press
Jul2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| Sumario: | Wordsworth's Immortality Ode laments his loss of a oneness with nature which he remembers from childhood. The essay interrogates the poem's equivocal representations of this elegiac strain, and then explores its immediate bibliographical context in the 1807 volume in which it was first published. The Ode's closing acknowledgement of the depth of reflection which can be prompted by 'the meanest flower' is understood in relation to the Ode's first print setting, and its connection to several poems in which the daisy figures as an emblem of a mature honesty and directness. I argue that the adult Wordsworth finds it impossible to shed his own adult experience in seeking to capture in verse the child's sense of simple joy in nature. The loss lamented in the Ode is thus characterised not as inability to remember childhood experience, but as an inability to recall the past without the shadowing of adult trauma. |
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