The 'Intimations' Ode and Victorian Romanticism

The "Intimations" Ode and Victorian RomanticismAuthor(s): Lawrence KramerReviewed work(s):Source: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1980), pp. 315-335Published by: West Virginia University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002840 .Accessed: 23/02/2012 01:04

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The "Intimations" Ode and

Victorian Romanticism LAWRENCE KRAMER

OF THE earliest clues to the unusually privileged place held by Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode in the Romantic tradition is

offered almost unconsciously by Wordsworth himself, in a poem written just ten years after the Ode was published. "Composed Upon An Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty" closes its extended description of a luminous sunset with a curious, muted shock of recognition:

Such hues from their celestial Urn Were wont to stream before mine eye, Where'er it wandered in the morn Of blissful infancy. This glimpse of glory, why renewed? Nay, rather speak with gratitude; For, if a vestige of those gleams Survived, 'twas only in my dreams. Dread Power! whom peace and calmness serve

Oh, let Thy grace remind me of the light Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored. (11. 61-74)'

We are, I suspect, likely to find these lines unproblematically lucid, but perhaps we can read them so easily only because we know the Ode so well. "The morn / Of blissful infancy" is really an allusion to Wordsworth by a rather different Wordsworth; and the ruefulness that the poem reads into "This glimpse of glory, why renewed?" is virtually unintelligible without the great Ode at its back. So too with the "light / Full early lost" and- by the earlier poem - "fruitlessly deplored." In short, "Composed Upon An Evening" takes the "Intimations" Ode as an authenticating prototype, a latent presence or matrix which is the real origin of its form and meaning.

In this the poem is hardly alone. The "Intimations" Ode stands like a horizon behind a whole array of Romantic and post-Romantic poems, from Coleridge's "Dejection" to Theodore Roethke's major sequences to

1 Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford Univ. Press, 1969).

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the work of contemporaries like John Ashbery.2 The Ode is the central and indispensable articulation of the Romantic dialectic in which the self seeks imaginative compensation for the loss of its capacity to experience the world as a radiant plenitude. Later poems rarely turn to this rhythm of loss and replenishment without taking over some of the language, structure, or imagery of the Ode, almost as if the Ode constituted a pattern of experience rather than a pattern of representation. Working through the dialectic of compensation, poets subsequent to Wordsworth regularly echo or re- invent the Ode at crucial moments; and the general structure of compensation in their poems reveals itself fully only in relation to the Wordsworthian prototype. The subject of this essay is the Victorian dialectic of compensation, a dialectic defined, as the poems seem compelled to define it, against the pattern established by the "Intimations" Ode. Compensation is, of course, central to Victorian poetry, almost an obsession of it. And in the difference between the Romantic original and the Victorian reconstruction, there lodges a radical change in the status and meaning of loss and of the imagination.

My thesis depends on the fact that the balance of loss and replenishment in Wordsworth's Ode turns on the acceptance of a replacement for the original experience of a world "apparelled in celestial light." As it appears in major Romantic poems like "Dejection," "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and "Ode to Psyche," this compensatory movement achieves a saving moment in which the present is relieved of the burden of loss and projected into the future under the sign of the replacement. Thus Wordsworth in the Ode exchanges grief for "primal sympathy"; Coleridge, in "Dejection," turns his self -consciousness outward to find a substitute self in the "Lady" who is to retain the joy he has lost;3 Shelley in the "Hymn" opens himself to future visitations by Intellectual Beauty with a calm hope that quietly accepts the uncertainty of its fulfillment; and Keats in the "Psyche" offers to create a pastoral paradise "in some untrodden region of my mind." In each of these cases, the compensatory rhythm depends upon the growth of what is in effect a new self, an altered subjectivity to which the

2The influence of the Ode is in part a product of its primacy in the genre that M. H. Abrams calls the Greater Romantic Lyric. See his essay, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," in From Sensibility to Romanticism'. Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle^ ed. Frederick Hilles and Harold Bloom (Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 527-560. For brief commentary on the relationship of Ashbery and Wordsworth, see my "The Wodwo Watches The Water Clock: Language in Postmodern British and American Poetry," ConL, 8 (1977), 319-342.

3 My implicit reading of "Dejection" here follows that of Kathleen Coburn, "Coleridge Redivivus," The Major English Romantic Poets, ed. C. D. Thorpe, Carlos Baker, and Bennett Weaver (Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1957), but the conclusion of the poem is a notorious bone of contention. If the compensatory rhythm of the poem fails, however, the means by which it attempts compensation are still those characteristic of the Romantic pattern.

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diminished external world is not the radically deprived place it has been to the troubled and restless self that preceded it. However tentatively, a balance is regained: the depleted world is weighed against a replenished self.

Victorian versions of this pattern are very different. The major Victorian poets all seem to feel a deep skepticism about the power of the self to generate compensation by regenerating itself, and the compensatory rhythm in their poems tends to look for things outside the self in order to make up its losses. These, in turn, are often inadequate, inaccessible, or even antithetical to the self that seeks them. In Tennyson's "The Two Voices," for instance, the Christian-pastoral landscape that delivers the poet from his suicidal interior monologue comes almost like grace, as a gift entirely from without. Where Wordsworth, in the "Intimations" Ode, turns refreshed from meditation to the landscape because his meditation has led him to the threshold of that landscape, Tennyson, in "The Two Voices," is startled into recognizing a landscape to which his meditation is blind, and in which the questions posed by the meditation are displaced, not answered. This alien or external quality is redoubled by the obvious indebtedness of the pastoral vision to the "Intimations" Ode itself, which, as in "Composed Upon An Evening," is the real origin of the meanings of the poem:

From out my sullen heart a power Broke, like the rainbow from the shower, To feel, although no tongue can prove, That every cloud, that spreads above And veileth love, itself is love.

And forth into the fields 1 went, And Nature's living motion lent The pulse of hope to discontent. (11. 443-450 )4

The rainbow belongs to the epigraph of the Ode; the clouds to its conclusion, where they gather round the setting sun. Tennyson, using a phrase as Wordsworthian as "Nature's living motion," emphasizes the connection rather than hiding it. This climactic veering towards the Ode openly seeks a poetic grace to parallel the grace of a nature imbued with love. But the openness of its appeal also underscores the sheer gulf between the language and vision of natural piety and the desperate argument with himself from which Tennyson builds the bulk of his poem. Wordsworth, in a passage Tennyson could not read in 1829, writes that human greatness must come out of the self: "that thou must give, / Else never can receive." Here, in a deeply troubled pattern that holds good for many major

4 Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, 1969).

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Victorian poems, the dictum is reversed. In what follows I will try to explore this reversal in poems by Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning.

In Memoriam: "An Image Comforting the Mind"

The relationship of In Memoriam to the Romantic dialectic of compensation is unusually complex. No less than The Prelude, Tennyson's poem records the growth of the poet's mind; and the growth it records is hesitant, self-perplexing, and haunted by quick shifts and shadings of resolution or irresolution.5 In Memoriam also takes in more patterns than one; and especially in its attempt to preserve human meanings in an alienated nature, its links to Romanticism are multiple. Whatever else it is, though, In Memoriam is surely a prolonged struggle to find a replacement for the lost presence - Hallam - that irradiated Tennyson's early world. Its effort, like that of the "Intimations" Ode, is to reconstruct a world of light out of a consciousness that has been darkened by its knowledge of death; for Hallam's death, like the death of Wordsworth's brother John, has cost the poet his vision of "the gleam, / The light that never was, on sea or land." Unlike Wordsworth, however, Tennyson is so haunted by a sense of missing presence that he cannot make the Romantic turn inward that brings compensation and renews the selfs relationship to the world. Instead, he fixes on the idea of an external principle of radiance and strains for reunion with it. The unfolding structure of In Memoriam, with its painfully slow ascent from complete despair, is defined by the gradual overcoming of the will to reunion with externals and the replacement of that will, or nostalgia, by an alteration in the self. This transformation, however, is followed by an abrupt reversal that reinstates the external principle as the compensatory one.

The poem unfolds this pattern in two broad sweeps or movements, which roughly divide it in half. The first of these is defined by the poet's despondent certainty that the world can offer him "no second friend" (VI). This leaves him no choice but to yearn helplessly towards the first friend; to plunge into visions of emptiness that enlarge Hallam's absence into the absence of a world, as when, standing before Hallam's "Dark house" and missing his handclasp, he watches while "On the bald street breaks the

5My treatment of In Memoriam skirts the much-discussed question of the "unity" of the poem and concentrates on its representation of consciousness in action. Similar approaches are taken by Robert Langbaum, The Modern Spirit (Oxford Univ. Press, 1970); Alan Sinfield, 77?^ Language of Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (New York, 197 1 ), esp. pp. 29-30; and Henry Puckett, "Subjunctive Imagination in In Memoriam," VP, 12 (1974), 97-124. Fora discussion of unity, see Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (New York, 1972), pp. 21 1-214. Morse Peckham's discussion of In Memoriam in Victorian Revolutionaries (New York, 1970), pp. 35-39, intersects with mine when it sees Tennyson as struggling to free himself from Hallam as a "charismatic" role model.

LA WRENCE KRAMER / 319

blank day" (VII); and to lapse into visions of reunion, as when he tells the ship bearing Hallam's body home that he "should not feel it to be strange" if Hallam should walk down the gangplank alive (XIV). (The speculation is half wish, half magic spell.) After extended mourning, though, Tennyson reverses himself and does elect a second friend to take Hallam's place, thereby initiating the second movement of the poem. The act of replacement is deeply ambiguous. Like the grief that will later annul itself by becoming an "April violet," so that it "buds and blossoms like the rest" of a returning spring (CXV), the new friendship, which Tennyson calls "The primrose of the later year" (LXXXV), marks a genuine recovery from the poet's disconsolate obsession with Hallam's absence. Yet it is clearly much less than enough for him. An "imperfect gift," the new friendship is "not so fresh" as the one with Hallam, and Tennyson neither can nor wants to "transfer / The whole I felt for him to you" (LXXXV). Even when the new friend (Edmund Lushington) completes Hallam's intended destiny and, in the epilogue, marries into Tennyson's family, the poet cannot help calling Hallam up as a silent wedding guest. Lushington, moreover, disappears from the poem completely after the "second friend" lyric, and reappears only in time for his own wedding. The poem, as if ebbing away from its brief return to life and the world, simply continues its course of mourning.

The course, though, runs differently than it did before, and the difference seems to depend on the brief appearance of the second friend. Apparently, the acceptance of Lushington as a surrogate for Hallam allows Tennyson to begin internalizing Hallam himself, turning the lost friend decisively into "An image comforting the mind" (LXXXV). Lushington, so to speak, tacitly holds the place of Hallam in the external world, and Tennyson's friendship with him becomes the turning point in the mourning process by directing inward the poet's impulse for reunion. The first sign of this inward turn, which makes a powerful effect when In Memoriam is read at a sitting, comes in the series of four lyrics (LXXXVI-LXXXIX) which follows immediately after the lyric to the second friend. The first of the four is an ecstatic vision of peace, the third a visitation of joy; the other two are reminiscences of Hallam at Cambridge, vividly detailed evocations which are the first recollections of the lost friend not burdened by the poet's grief for him. Once the "widowed" heart begins to "beat again / For other friends," sufficient reunion can take place in the recollecting mind, at least for awhile; and its appearance there mingles with the revival of a visionary gleam that can "flash along" the poet's song with "The glory of the sum of things" (LXXXVIII).

In their turn, these reminiscences and epiphanies are followed by a brief group of lyrics (XC.21-24; XCI-XCIII) that try to say openly just how Hallam should come back to Tennyson. These are the first lyrics in the


poem that actually invoke Hallam, the first to summon or beckon him and the first to address him with imperatives. The effect of this is to diminish the distance between Tennyson and his dead friend; yet this diminishment takes place alongside a conscious shift from Tennyson's desire to re- encounter Hallam literally, as an other - "Someone before him to see and to know"6 - and his discovery of the compensatory power in an intangible inner sense of Hallam's presence. As an other, Hallam throughout the

poem has receded from Tennyson's grasp, "turned to something strange" (XLI); apostrophes to him, as a rule, have been willingly cast into a void.7 Here, however, by relinquishing Hallam as other, Tennyson can find the

imaginative strength to draw Hallam closer to him - to draw him into the self. One way to look at the process is as a reversal of the pattern of pastoral elegy, where consolation usually follows the relocation of the dead figure to another realm, arguably as the result of a deliteralization of the

relationship between the mourner and the mourned. In Memoriam assumes Hallam's removal to another realm from the start, and spends its strength battering at the gates. Only when it loosens the elegiac separation of realms into a metaphor, and begins to center on how Hallam can still be experienced imaginatively, does it find consolation becoming accessible. The pattern, of course, is Wordsworthian. Its decisive step, echoing the "Intimations" Ode, is the firm renunciation of lost glory and the imaginative repossession of what remains behind.

In the first of these inward-turning apostrophes, a double invocation which first seeks Hallam's presence as an other and then its withdrawal, Tennyson asks for a springtime visitation from the dead man in "the form by which I knew / Thy spirit in time." The visitation, charged with "The hope of unaccomplished years," is oddly muted and chastened. It is very much a manifestation of the season, a season Tennyson represents as a hesitant time, only half-vital, when the thrush, in a pointed ambiguity, pipes "rarely," and "underneath the barren bush / Flits by the sea-blue bird of March" (XCI). Hallam's springtime return should herald plenitude; after all, his death has left Tennyson with "prospect and horizon gone" (XXXVIII). But plenitude here is reserved for the "summer's hourly- mellowing change," and the summer landscape that measures an overflowing fulfillment with its "thousand waves of wheat." Hallam is asked to enter the summer fullness "like a finer light in light": a celestial light, Wordsworthian in ambience, whose presence clearly depends on the eye's capacity to see it. No longer an impossibly distant other, the Hallam of the ripened season is identified with the immediacy of natural plenitude

^Wallace Stevens, "Bouquet of Belle Scavoir." 7For example, sections XXXVIII, XL, XLI, L, LXI, LXIV.


as Tennyson participates in it. Hallam's presence as an other has been the bond uniting Tennyson and the world; his absence, correspondingly, has severed the poet from nature's "glow" and "bloom" (II), as a similar absence threatened to do to Wordsworth in the "Intimations" Ode. Now, Hallam's absence as an other becomes his presence as a principle of vision, a transparency through which Tennyson partakes of natural abundance. The replacement for the Hallam who is lost is Tennyson's own imagination.

This shift towards a compensation rooted in the self is intensified by the next two apostrophes, but in a problematical way. In the first lyric, Tennyson decisively tells Hallam that any vision of his "likeness" would necessarily be an illusion, "a wind / Of memory murmuring the past" (XCII). In the next, Hallam is invoked as a spirit, and told to "Descend, and touch, and enter" Tennyson's self - to come, not as someone to see and to know, but as a blindly intuited quality of inwardness. This interiorized reunion of the bereft self with the origin of its own former wholeness is a mythified and personalized version of the visionary pattern celebrated in the "Intimations" Ode, in which the "first affections" that form "the fountain light of all our day" are accessible to healing recollections. Where Wordsworth's imagination revisits "obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things," Tennyson's rejects the "visual shade of some one lost" and receives Hallam's mystic return beyond "the nerve of sense." But where this principle of imagination is an inviolable source of renewal for Wordsworth, it suffers for Tennyson from a kind of slippage towards externality, a latent return of nostalgia for the other. By literally beckoning Hallam down from the "sightless range" of spirits, "the distance of the abyss / Of tenfold-complicated change," Tennyson lets his impulse to take Hallam into himself recede into the elegiac distance separating the realms of life and death. His apostrophe cannot in itself compel or create a Hallam within him; it can only desire one, with a "wish too strong for words to name." And though the wish alone opens the self to compensation, the literalness of its terms leaves empty the self it opens. By insisting that the inner feeling have an external origin, Tennyson subtly reinstates his desire for actual reunion. It may be that a finer light in light is not quite enough to have; the progression of lyrics implies as much. But literal communion with the dead is too much to ask, and after this lyric the poem never asks for it again.

Later, reflecting on this difficulty, Tennyson deprecates the "vacant

yearning" to "scale the heaven's highest height," repudiating both the

nostalgia for reunion and the myth of elegiac distance with a single bitter

question: "What find I in the highest place, / But mine own phantom chanting hymns?" (CVIII). Reunion, if it comes, will come after death (CX VI I, CXXI V-V); meanwhile, it is better to take "what fruit may be / Of sorrow under human skies" (CVIII). In order todo that, Tennyson turns to


a Wordsworthian myth of memory. More exactly, he begins a gradual movement towards a recovery and intensification of the Wordsworthian blending of memory and imagination which has already proved consoling in the Cambridge lyrics (LXXXVII, LXXXIX) that follow the lyric to the second friend. There, the role of reminiscence is to recover a full but clearly imaginative sense of Hallam's lost presence through the serene evocation of particulars. The visionary memory that results satisfies both natural and supernatural longings, putting Tennyson in touch with a Hallam who is at once a demythified figure of past richness and a kind of genius loci for the Cambridge where Tennyson knew him. One way to understand the "heaven-scaling" impulse that qualifies the call to descend and enter is as a lingering desire to transcend this potent but limited contact, with its sacrifice of a presence somehow real for one only recalled, however vividly. In part, the remainder of In Memoriam is a slow relinquishment of that transcendental desire, a process that culminates in the liberation of memory.

The key lyric in Tennyson's letting go of whatever memory cannot compass is generally recognized as the climax of the sequence (XCV).8 Here, on the lawn at night, the poet turns from a richly abundant and tranquil summer landscape to read Hallam's letters - "those fallen leaves that keep their green," he calls them, quietly placing them in an almost Rilkean landscape of vision. What follows is a reminiscence that lets the self enter that landscape. Rather than simply turning the mind from present to past, Tennyson's imaginative memory renders the present moment uncanny and draws the past into the uncanniness. As soon as it begins, the reminscence chafes at the bounds of time and space:

And strangely on the silence broke The silent-speaking words, and strange Was love's dumb cry defying change

To test his worth.

The verbal texture of oxymoron here corresponds with a rift in the invisible wall between presence and absence, the present and the past; and as divisions crumble, Tennyson feels Hallam grow closer "word by word and line by line." As the sense of presence grows, however, a kind of crisis point is reached in which the rich revisiting in mind seems suddenly to pass into a real reunion:

"See Langbaum, Modern Spirit, pp. 64-65. John D. Jump, in "Tennyson's Religious Faith and Doubt," Tennyson, ed. D. J. Palmer (Ohio Univ. Press, 1973), p. 95, offers a kind of normative reading in which XCV is climactic because Tennyson there achieves union with Hallam's spirit.


And all at once it seemed at last The living soul was flashed on mine, And mine in this was wound, and whirled

And came on that which is, and caught The deep pulsations of the world.

Suddenly, Hallam seems not only to obey Tennyson's earlier invocation to descend, but actually to offer a personal apocalypse, uncovering "that which is." But the "Aeonian music" of this rapture is abruptly cut short by Tennyson's own skepticism about it: "cancelled, stricken through with doubt." It is crucial to recognize the delicate balance of forces here. As vision, Tennyson's reminiscence can make his sorrow bear fruit; as mystic ascent, it must fail. Recalling this collapse of apparent reunion, the poet neither validates nor denies the experience. Instead, he throws doubt on his own capacity to describe or understand it, and goes on to re-evoke the summer vista that it has displaced.

This evocation begins by repeating the three hypnotic lines of scene- painting that immediately precede Tennyson's turn from the natural landscape to Hallam's letters:

Till now the doubtful dusk revealed The knolls once more where, couched at ease, The white kine glimmered, and the trees

Laid their dark arms about the field.

The effect of this is a kind of starting over, as if the interval of vision and mystic trance had never taken place. The dusk of evening elides into the dusk before dawn, and that, in turn, gives way to a dawn which provides a vision to replace what has been "cancelled." A "freshening breeze," at once a pneuma of inspiration displacing Hallam's "living soul" and a natural herald of sunrise, sounds up and dies away, disentangling sound and silence. Then

. . . East and West, without a breath, Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,

To broaden into endless day.

What is significant here is that the summer landscape, taken into metaphor, picks up the mingling of life and death that constituted the cancelled trance and reenacts it in the medium of imagination. Where imagination unifies life and death, Tennyson and Hallam, the world, though it lacks Hallam's

presence, appears as an endless day. The dawn, it is true, may admit too much absence, much as the silence of night did when it became the "sound" of love's dumb cry; but the dawn consoles the absence it admits, as the trance could not finally do. Then again, it may be that the trance, however dubious, is the hidden origin of the reconciling dawn; but what brings consolation, and the closure of the lyric, is the light of imagination, not the

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invisible and uncertain "flash" of Hallam's "living soul." In fact, despite the climactic feel of this lyric, its role in the sequence is still mediatory. Tennyson here has again moved away from reunion with Hallam as an other, then veered towards it; and he has again ended with a finer light in light. It still remains to find an inner Hallam who is more than light and less than anima.

The passage to this inner Hallam takes in a new cluster of reminiscence lyrics before reaching a fourfold climax. The primary importance of the reminiscence lyrics (CIX, CX, CXI I) lies in their form, which marks the growing power of memory to console by combining recollection with apostrophe for the first time in In Memoriam.9 The lyrics enforce a tacit equation: to remember Hallam is to talk to him. A more potent equation, however, comes forward in the crucial lyric CXIX, where Tennyson acts out the force of memory by returning to Hallam's house. Here, prompted by a "light-blue lane of early dawn" - a light of vision both literal and figurative, which harks back to the dawn of endless day in the trance lyric -

Tennyson approaches Hallam in the imagination and greets him within the self:

And bless thee, for thy lips are bland, And bright the friendship of thine eye; And in my thoughts with scarce a sigh

I take the pressure of thine hand.

This is the only moment in In Memoriam when Tennyson and Hallam actually touch each other, and their only certain "meeting" of any kind. The poignant strength of the passage is to blend the reality and the unreality of the moment into a single irreducible gesture. The key words here, of course, are "scarce a sigh," an unassuming phrase by which Tennyson both admits the inadequacy of memory to give back wholly what is lost and celebrates the imaginative love which can give back so much. This complex resolution takes on added weight because it reduplicates and reverses the pattern of the famous, deeply despairing lyric, "Dark house, by which once more I stand" (VII). The earlier lyric, mourning the "hand that can be clasped no more," finds the street bald, the dawn blank, and the self reduced to a sleepless, obscurely guilty thing. The late lyric, revising this vision of emptiness, offers a re-animating of the self and a filling-in of the world, as Tennyson's senses in turn each respond to a new fullness:

9Lyric XXI I is a partial exception, but it proves the rule. In this lyric, apostrophe replaces recollection when recollection is overridden by the awareness of loss.


1 smell the meadow in the street; I hear a chirp of birds; I see

A light-blue lane of early dawn, And think of early days and thee.

The lyric also underlines its perfect fusion of presence and absence by shifting, without warning, from apostrophizing the house to apostrophizing Hallam. To remember Hallam is to talk to him; to talk to him is to take his hand.

In the third lyric following (CXXII), Tennyson deepens the inwardness of his compensation by asking Hallam to be with him in a re- animation of spirit by which Hallam himself is utterly forgotten:

If thou wert with me, and the grave Divide us not, be with me now, And enter in at breast and brow,

Till all my blood, a fuller wave, Be quickened with a livelier breath,

And like an inconsiderate boy, As in the former flash of joy,

I slip the thoughts of life and death; And all the breeze of Fancy blows,

And every dew-drop paints a bow, The wizard lightnings deeply glow,

And every thought breaks out a rose.

Syntactically, these lines are a long, conditional invocation to Hallam; imaginatively, they are a headlong rush to celebrate the release of the self into joy. The cross-purposes are just the point. What matters about the invocation is that it does not matter at all; for once, it is the joy that is inevitable, whether the grave divides the two friends or not. Throughout the poem, the imagery of separation has been a sign of torment; here, it appears as a ritualized gesture, a grace-note to the song of the self s resurgence. Clearly, the speaker of these exuberant closing lines has already "slipped the thoughts of life and death." Forgetting his loss, he is beginning to experience a world as rich as the one he knew through Hallam's presence. The lyric, despite its call for Hallam to enter in at breast and brow, actually testifies to the internalization of Hallam as an imaginative principle. By formalizing and distancing the desire for Hallam to enter the self as a real presence, it frees itself to find its joy "without" him.

The two lyrics I have just discussed, which form a kind of pair, establish the moment in In Memoriam when Tennyson's attitude most resembles Wordsworth's at the end of the "Intimations" Ode - the moment when, "thanks to the human heart by which we live," he comes closest to casting out regret without denying loss. The final pair of apostrophes go further, with bewildering results. In the first of them (CXXIX), Tennyson addresses Hallam as "Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine," and goes on to


infuse the Hallam thus possessed into the fabric of the world - as if, having internalized his friend to the point where nothing has been lost at all, he can now re-externalize him as a product of the imagination: "Behold, I dream a dream of good, / And mingle all the world with thee." The lyric following (CXXX) is an elaboration of this mingling, which creates for Tennyson a world very much like the one Wordsworth, in the Ode, claims for his childhood: a reality in which a palpable divine presence fuses at every moment with the world:

Thy voice is on the rolling air; I hear thee where the waters run; Thou standest in the rising sun,

And in the setting thou art fair.

This passage is at once an assimilation of the motion and the spirit of "Tintern Abbey" which "rolls through all things"; a claim that Hallam, not despite his loss but because of it, is more to Tennyson now than he ever was; and, surprisingly, a deification along the lines of pastoral elegy, where Hallam, like Lycidas, becomes the "Genius of the shore," or, like Keats in "Adonais," a distant celestial light. Hallam's presence, always finite before, is now virtually infinite, as Tennyson, to adapt Coleridge's critique of Wordsworth, takes the light reflected as a light bestowed and forgets that what he sees is what he imagines.

A denial of loss as radical as this might seem to invite resistance, like Tennyson's mystic trance. Does the final apostrophe show Tennyson losing himself in a world of his own making, falling into a Heideggerian inauthenticity by forgetting about death? Certainly, in any case, one can insist on an unacknowledged irony: that the poem, whose cumulative progression constitutes the gradual acceptance of an imaginative inner Hallam over an ethereal outer one as compensation for the loss of the real man, should end with such a powerfully asserted illusion of real presence. Or perhaps one could argue that the internalization of Hallam is, at last, only a mediatory stage, however prolonged, and that the real impetus of the poem is towards the ultimate discovery of an external replacement for him - his presence as a "diffusive power" in "star and flower." Actually, all that can be said for sure is that the triumphant conclusion of the poem admits of these ambiguities, and that they are there because the poem has had to struggle with a deep skepticism about the self s power to imagine and sustain compensation for its losses.

Apparently, this underlying tension is something that Tennyson is willing to let stand. The epilogue shows the poet at his sister's wedding to Edmund Lushington, at home in a world without Hallam. And there, the passionately mythified externality of the last apostrophe dissipates into a serene uncertainty, a surmise unclouded by a need for truth:


Nor count me all to blame if I Conjecture of a stiller guest, Perchance, perchance, among the rest.

Is that stiller guest projected - "conjectured" - by a powerful imagination, or is he somehow intuited - "Perchance, perchance" - as an actual member of the wedding? Which is as much as to say: how much Wordsworthian Romanticism is reflected here? Not enough, at any rate, for an answer to the question.

"The Scholar-Gipsy"; "Thyrsis": "The Freshness of the Early World"

So many of Arnold's poems engage the dialectic of compensation that the pattern might be seen as his major debt to Wordsworth, though Arnold, who insisted that Wordsworth taught the nineteenth century how to feel, would not have agreed.10 With Arnold, the compensatory process focuses on images that mediate between the poet's familiar incommensurates: an early world of rich, authentic life and the belated modern world of sterility and alienation. Both the Scholar-Gipsy and the signal-tree of "Thyrsis" are images of this kind, the latter a direct descendant of the strange, singular tree in the "Intimations" Ode that "speaks of something that is gone" in a landscape otherwise deprived of its radical radiance. As they do in Wordsworth, these images - we can call them "boundary-images," using a convenient term of Geoffrey Hartman's11 - transform a landscape by depositing a trace of the early world within the belated one, thus creating a kind of threshold to the past without admitting access to it. In the "Intimations" Ode, the presence of boundary-images is disturbing. By standing out from a seemingly fulfilled, yet obscurely depleted, pastoral setting, they heighten the poet's consciousness of loss and initiate the regretful meditation tha will issue in a stronger self. With Arnold, however, the boundary-images are not troubled beginnings but healing end-points, unique external forms to which the poet of "The Scholar- Gipsy" and "Thyrsis" clings for compensation while still tormented by loss. In fact, it might be argued that the unfolding of these poems coincides with a progressive weakening of the self, which ends in a state of spiritual exhaustion so extreme that even the boundary-image is of dubious value.

l0On Wordsworth and Arnold's poetry, see U. C. Knoepflmacher, "Dover Beach Revisited: The Wordsworthian Matrix in the Poetry of Arnold," VP, 1 (1963), 17-26. Knoepflmacher notes that Wordsworth was able to "convert grief and pain into joyous affirmation" as the Victorians were not.

"See Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (Yale Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 198ff.


The poems, especially "Thyrsis," try hard to avert this depletion, but it haunts the compensatory rhythm in both of them.

Arnold's tart rejection of the underlying myth of the "Intimations" Ode - "this idea, of undeniable beauty as a play of fancy, has itself not the character of poetic truth of the best kind; it has no real solidity"12 - did not

stop him from re-creating the same myth in his two Oxford poems, with a lost Oxford replacing the lost landscape of an early world. Both "The

Scholar-Gipsy" and "Thyrsis" act out a failed attempt to return to that

mythic Oxford in order to recover something from it that will soothe the

present. The attempt, in both cases, has a strong overtone of something magical to it, as Arnold's use of Glanvil's legend invites it to. In a sense, these poems reverse the Romantic impulse to create demythified substitutes for inherited mythic patterns; they mythify fully and self-

consciously, seeking, with what Yeats disparagingly called "our modern

hope," realities rather than images. But since Arnold's consciousness is all- too-modern, this impulse to mythify, to freeze boundary-images into

magical objects, requires him to resist his own deep awareness that even images may be too much to ask for, since the only accessible reality is the "strange disease of modern life."

As an "Intimations" poem, "The Scholar-Gipsy" has a tripartite structure. The first, and longest, section is an evocation of the Scholar- Gipsy and his Oxford which quickly becomes an illusion of their presence and sustains itself in that mode for a surprisingly long time. The second section is an abrupt breakdown of the illusion, rather like Keats's at a similar point in the "Ode to a Nightingale." This part of the poem modulates into a lament over modern life; what is surprising, even startling, about it is that while it depends on the recognition that the Scholar-Gipsy is a fiction, an image, it treats him, precisely because he is an image, as a living being. The last section of the poem, and the most puzzling of all, is the extended injunction to the Scholar-Gipsy to "fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles" (1. 231). This section is a kind of retraction: a renunciation of the one thing, whether man or image, that can mediate between the incompatible worlds of fresh and faded life. Arnold's surrender of the Gipsy in effect de-creates his whole poem; and the last two stanzas, with the famous extended simile that so wrenchingly disrupts all feeling of rhetorical balance, seem to testify to a deliberate undoing.13

l2" Wordsworth," from Essays in Criticism, Second Series (1888); "Poems of Wordsworth" (1879). Reprinted in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston, 1961), pp. 331-346.

l3The discontinuity of the final simile has not been emphasized enough. Attempts to work it smoothly into the poem include those by A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (Yale Univ. Press, 1966), p. 192; and Alan Roper, Arnold's Poetic Landscapes (The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 222-223.


The first section moves very gradually from the natural to the supernatural and from the immediate present to a timeless amalgam of Arnold's Oxford and Glanvil's. The turning point in this movement is the sudden apostrophe to the Scholar-Gipsy: "And I myself seem half to know thy looks" (1. 62), which introduces a series of seven stanzas that work powerful illusionist magic in both rhetoric and imagery. Arnold's purpose here is to create an almost hypnotic sense of stasis; so only a single one of the stanzas needs quotation. In each case, the presence of the boundary- image admits the self into the timeless and radiant landscape of the early world; and in each case, the fading away of the image is the clue for its immediate reappearance in another part of the landscape:

For most, I know, thou lov'st retired ground! Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe,

Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,

Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt's rope chops round;

And leaning backward in a pensive dream, And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers Pluck'd in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers,

And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream.

And then they land, and thou art seen no more! (11. 7 1-8 1)14

This lush, slow-paced poetry casts its spell through the evocative power of place-names and the use of "characteristic" imagery - imagery like the punt with the chopping rope, which, while highly concrete, signifies not an individual incident but a feature of Oxonian life so recurrent that it is virtually a part of the landscape at any time. The stanza is thus an insistent summoning up of the spirit of the place, in a nearly literal sense of the phrase; the animating principle here- or should one say the animate one? - is a mythified quality of locale. Oxford, which as the poem tells us has a forest ground called Thessaly, is Arcadia: the real thing. This impression is reinforced by the peculiar quality attached to the Scholar- Gipsy. His figure is always linked, by metonymy, with the landscape, from which he dimly and uncertainly emerges and into which he fades when approached. In what is again a nearly literal way, he is the genius loci of this Oxonian paradise; his status, perhaps, is closest to that of Autumn in Keats's Ode, a figure who is at once contained by the landscape and identical with it. Like Hallam in some of the In Memoriam lyrics, the Scholar-Gipsy is a humanization of Wordsworth's celestial light; and, like Tennyson in the hyperbolic last apostrophe of In Memoriam, Arnold cannot recognize him as a creature of his own imagination.

"Poetical Works, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (Oxford Univ. Press, 1950).

330/ VICTORIAN POETRY

The second section of "The Scholar-Gipsy" is most strongly marked by the abandonment of the rhetorical mode of the first for the very modern voice of Arnold condemning himself and the rest of us as "Light half- believers of our casual creeds, / Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd" (11. 172-173). The transition to this increasingly bitter and despairing critique of modern selfhood is a curious section in which Arnold first

imagines the Scholar's grave, then decides that he is immortal, because a fiction. Nothing, I suppose, can remove the sense of oddity in the situation of a disillusioned modern talking passionately to a kind of collegiate nature -spirit, but the underlying logic of the apostrophe at this point is fairly compelling. The Scholar-Gipsy is the self s one link to the lost early world. When the illusion of revisiting that world is broken, the link can be preserved only by preserving the Scholar-Gipsy in its absence. In order to do that, Arnold, who can no longer see the magical figure in the Oxford landscape, converts him from a numinous presence into an ideal self: a unified consciousness who can measure, condemn, and yet inspire a divided one. To the disillusioned mind, the Scholar-Gipsy is compensation: a rescued or reified fragment of the lost world, a strong external principle of self dialectically bound to the broken modern inwardness that must "wave all claim to bliss, and try to bear" (1. 193).

But this, too, falls apart. In the end, Arnold is unwilling to bind the Scholar-Gipsy to himself. Since modern life is a disease, the Scholar would necessarily catch it, so that first his "cheer," then he himself, would die. These are deaths that the poem cannot let happen. If the Scholar-Gipsy were to become "Like us distracted, and like us unblest" (1. 225), then fade away, there would be nothing left to border on the early world, no link at all to the Arcadian past. Rather than sever his love from the Scholar's Oxford so radically, Arnold prefers to restore him to his original landscape, even at the cost of never again finding access to that landscape in illusions of presence. The Scholar-Gipsy is thus told to keep his solitude; to rove "Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue" (1. 215); to "listen with enchanted ears, / From the dark dingles, to the nightingales" (11.21 9-220), like an ideal Keats who need never lose the enchantment. The poem thus makes its painful way to the conclusion of a strange logic. What matters is that the Scholar-Gipsy be. The last illusion of the modern mind, he can go on existing only if he is not pursued, not imagined by a corrosive modern consciousness; and Arnold, with a tormented generosity, relinquishes the imagination's hold on him. If the poem, in Alan Roper's deft formula, discovers that good dreams are possible in bad times (p. 224), it adds a strange proviso: they are possible if we stop dreaming them. The modern self cannot be compensated for modernity by intimations of a richer life,


but only by the hard authenticity it finds in renouncing everything it can recognize as compensation.15

"The Scholar-Gipsy" is a much more tortured and tortuous poem than "Thyrsis," but Arnold's elegy for Clough shares both the impetus of the earlier poem towards a boundary-image and its arrest from one. "Thyrsis," of course, turns on the signal-elm which, signifying that the Scholar-Gipsy is still a presence in the Cumner Hills, is meant to compensate the poet not only for the death of his friend but for the whole burden of loss that leaves "The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew, / The heart less bounding at emotion new" (11. 138-139). And the tree does, in the moment of its recovery at sunset, open the landscape to celestial light. But it is for a moment only, and at that a moment defined not by the coming of the light but by its going, as if Arnold had reached the threshold offered by the boundary-image just in time to say good-bye to what it brings: "The west unflushes, the high stars grow bright, / And in the scatter'd farms the lights come out" (11. 163-164). This is genuine illumination, but it is the illumination of the Abend/and. Its movement from starlight to the light from scattered farms traces a fading of visionary light, not into the light of common day but into the light of common darkness; and the moment of vision coincides exactly with the recognition of arrest: "I cannot reach the signal-tree to-night" (1. 165). Finding is losing; meeting is parting.

Arnold refuses to regret the inacessibility of the tree, and goes on to refuse regret in any form, even as grief, as if the tree, speaking of something that is gone, were enough to recompense his losses. Yet as the poem closes, it gradually loses its hold on the tree, and as it does its compensation ebbs into uncertainty. Recalling the death of Clough, Arnold insists that he will not despair while he can still see "That lonely tree against the western sky" (1. 195).That the tree stands means that the Scholar-Gipsy is still on his quest; "Woods with anemonies in flower till May, / Know him a wanderer still," writes Arnold; "then why not me?" (11. 199-200). But it is not a rhetorical question. In the last stanza, repeating a line used earlier in lament, Arnold admits that his visits to Oxford are "Too rare, too rare." All he can do is wish to hear Thyrsis' voice, amid the "great town's harsh, heart- wearying roar," reassuring him that the tree is still there. The irony is latent, but strong. To plead for reassurance suggests impending uncertainty; to ask for a voice from the grave to supply the reassurance suggests a self too

l5Cf. J. Hillis Miller's remarks about the conclusion of the poem in The Disappearance of God (The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1963).


full of "fatigue and fear" to reassure itself.16 The heart-wearying city is the

landscape of Arnold's spirit, and he haunts it (and it him) as the Gipsy haunts the "loved hill-side." Unlike the Wordsworth of "Tintern Abbey," he cannot bring his pastoral vision with him amid its noise. In "Thyrsis," compensation reverses the direction it takes in In Memoriam and passes from the certainty of vision to the hope of visitation. Once it goes, nothing - especially not the self - can make certain it will come again.

"Prologue" to Asolando: "The Poet's Age is Sad"

The dialectic of compensation is a fairly frequent theme in Browning's monologues, most often in the context of an erotic loss which is at the same time a visionary one. "Andrea del Sarto" comes most readily to mind; other examples are "The Last Ride Together" and "James Lee's Wife." Yet one of Browning's most fascinating treatments of the subject comes in a poem of unacknowledged importance, the "Prologue" to his last volume, Asolando. In part, the poem is interesting simply because it is the most direct response by a major Victorian poet to the "Intimations" Ode itself. l7 Its directness, in fact, is so singular a feature as to be a little bewildering. The beginning of the poem, for instance, is so Wordsworthian in language that it is hard to remember, reading it, that Browning is shifting the locus of argument from maturity to old age:

"The poet's age is sad: for why? In youth, the natural world could show

No common object but his eye At once involved with alien glow." (11. 1-4)18

Poetry like this seems tailor-made for treatment as an instance of poetic influence, in Harold Bloom's sense of the term.19 Yet Browning in the "Prologue" is not engaged in an "intrapoetic" struggle against Wordsworth; he is engaged in a struggle against himself. Though it does offer some "misreadings" of the Ode as a part of its rhetorical strategy, Browning's poem is not concerned with revising its precursor's dialectic but with the selfs inability to escape that dialectic - the hard balance of visionary loss and compensation, regardless of how those terms are

16 Perhaps these ironies can help explain the peculiarity, noted by Culler, that Clough's voice is asked to come and say "the very words which in the poem he could not hear" (Imaginative Reason, p. 267).

l7Joseph Baker, Pippa Passes and Shorter Poems of Robert Browning (New York, 1947), p. 627, also draws attention to Browning's response to Wordsworth in this poem. Baker, however, reads the poem as a simple refusal to feel "romantic regret" for visionary loss.

^Complete Poetical and Dramatic Works, Cambridge Edition (Boston, 1895). l9See The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford Univ. Press, 1973) and A Map of Misreading

(Oxford Univ. Press, 1975).

LA WRENCE KRAMER j 333

defined. A profoundly self-subverting poem, the "Prologue" takes a tortuously ironic course in order to rebuke and revoke its own concern with the loss of a visionary gleam in nature, while at the same time finding an unshakable external compensation for the loss it deprecates.

The process begins with the sudden turn of the poem against its own opening lines, which form a kind of condensed and revised version of the "Intimations" Ode apparently meant to be spoken by the reader - who obviously knows his Wordsworth. The poet first speaks up in his own voice to demolish the reader's Romantic discontent by demonstrating rather pungently that what the Wordsworthian view regards as a loss is actually a gain. The reader has identified the "alien glow" of nature seen in youth as "the soul's own iris-bow." In context, the phrase is ambiguous, but the speaker interprets it to mean that the "glory" found playing over natural forms in youth is a projection of the youthful imagination. Is it not better, he asks rhetorically, to see things as they are, "Clear outlined, past escape, / The naked very thing," than to see the world through an "optic glass" as "ruby, emerald, chrysopras" - in other words, in "falsehood's fancy-haze"? Reduced to perceptual particulars, the landscape will render up its "inmost self," the presence of "truth ablaze." Should that not more than compensate for the loss of a fictive radiance? The poem assigns the reader no reply to this, which would seem to settle the point. But instead of developing the speaker's point of view, the poem introduces a startling formal discontinuity that decisively undoes it.

In its fifth stanza, the poem abruptly stops its debate between the reader and the poet and becomes a Romantic lyric in which the speaker, apostrophizing Asolo, meditates on the difference between the landscape as he saw it first and the landscape as he sees it now. And the difference, in a blunt and disorienting self-contradiction, is precisely the Wordsworthian one that has just been savaged. Or, more exactly, it is even more Wordsworthian, because in expressing it the speaker not only reverses his own critique of the "Intimations" pattern, but also revises the reader's version in a way that leaves it invulnerable to the kind of critique he has used against it. Asolo here acts as a privileged, half-magical place, like Arnold's Oxford, and its presence seems to violate the antinomy of fact and fancy to which the speaker has tried to reduce the "Intimations" pattern. Confronting Asolo, Browning recalls an "alien glow" that will not be contained by the idea of projection or the image of a tinted lens: a radiance so intense that "natural objects seemed to stand / Palpably fire -clothed!" No mere work of fancy, this "lambent flame" made all visible objects into extensions of the Mosaic bush, "Burning but unconsumed." Even more than the young Wordsworth, the young Browning sees nature as literally sacred; and he emphasizes more than Wordsworth the terror in the beauty, the uncanniness that identifies perception of the sacred with transgression.


"Blank misgivings of a Creature / Moving about in worlds not realized" give way to the staggering power of personal theophany:

No mastery of mine o'er these! Terror with beauty, like the Bush

Burning but unconsumed. Bend knees, Drop eyes to earthward! Language? Tush!

Silence 't is awe decrees. (11. 26-30)

Browning's early nature is so radiant that it cannot finally be seen at all; and it consumes language as it consumes vision, a feature that clearly belittles Browning's earlier attempt to dispose of the "Intimations" pattern with a loaded rhetorical question.

These negations of the poet's earlier position all work by lifting the "fanciful" part of early experience beyond the reductive idea of fancy. The negation continues as the meditation on Asolo also lifts the "factual" half of later experience beyond the consoling certainty of fact. Stripped down to "the naked very thing" - "Hill, vale, tree, flower" - Asolo refuses to offer its inmost self in a vision of truth. For one thing, like the May pastoral in the "Intimations" Ode, the landscape at Asolo retains its "rare / O'er- running beauty," which "crowds the eye," yet also starkly testifies to the loss of the lambent flame from the "naked world." "The Bush," Browning says, "is bare." Furthermore, the presence of demythified objects standing "distinct, / Nature to know and name," clarifies nothing and defines nothing. It, not the fire-clothed landscape of early days, is the mystified scene, and the poet can only ask of it, "What then?"

The answer to that question is the most disconcerting thing in this disconcerting poem. Until this point, Browning has presented his

experience of Asolo in old age in the present tense. Now, veering away from his meditation with another sharp discontinuity, he presents the same experience as a thing past, announcing that "A Voice spoke thence which

straight unlinked / Fancy from fact" (11. 38-39). The Voice belongs to God; and it speaks out to rebuke the poet for seeking transcendence in the creation rather than in the creator: "At Nature dost thou shrink amazed? / God is it who transcends" (11. 44-45). At this, of course, the restored dialectic of visionary loss is wholly collapsed. Regret for the lambent flame stands revealed as a kind of sacrilege, or a sacrilegious nostalgia. Yet at the same time, the self that has been deprived of theophany in nature has been compensated by an unmediated colloquy with the divine - a compensation by transcendence. Browning underscores this new reversal by insisting on a distinction between the "purged ear" that "apprehends / Earth's import" and the "eye late dazed" which cannot. The shift from seeing to hearing as the medium of revelation is an attempt to degrade the specifically visionary character of a "Palpably fire-clothed" world beyond innocent self- projection to an absurd optical illusion, and at the same time an attempt to


revalue language as a vehicle for truth. In the same vein, the reintroduction of the fact-fancy antinomy is meant to have a corrosive effect on the Asolo meditation that has passed the bounds set by fact and fancy.

At the close, the "Prologue" to Asolando wants to have things both ways: to purge the self of feeling the burden of visionary loss and to compensate the loss with a more than visionary gain. In a latent way, this awkward maneuver testifies to the quality of desperation in Victorian dealings with the Wordsworthian pattern. The poem, with its wrenching discontinuities, nearly comes to imply that no natural compensation for the loss of early radiance is possible. The replacement for a "Palpably fire- clothed" world, clarity, turns out to be a fiction; while the self, though its voice is robust, is even more limited in its powers than the one in Arnold, and "achieves" its compensation only in the act of being rebuked by divinity. This shakiness of selfhood is particularly imposing, though one could easily make too much of it; after all, it represents only one extreme position in Browning's lifelong involvement with the Romantic possibilities of the self. Yet by leaving the self as shaky as it does, Browning's "Prologue" reveals the depth of the problem of compensation; and it does so, in its way, even more extremely than the more important poems by Tennyson and Arnold discussed earlier.

By way of conclusion, it might be suggestive to take as typical the seemingly inconsequential fact that Arnold, at least in his essay on Wordsworth, did not recognize the value of The Prelude. Perhaps one reason why is that The Prelude is a continual celebration of the "majestic intellect" that Wordsworth sees in vision on Mount Snowdon: a mind that "broods over the dark abyss" like the divine Word. For Arnold, for Victorian poets in general, that is too extravagant a conception. It is the mind's vulnerability, not its majesty, that most appears in Victorian poetry; and this is particularly true when Victorian poets turn to the pattern of compensation that originates in the "Intimations" Ode. These poets fully share Wordsworth's problem with the self - the problem of the selfs inherent tendency to decline in power once its power has come forward -

but they are most often in retreat from his solutions. Unlike their Romantic

predecessors, they are unable to rely on the generative power of the mind, and they tend to look outside themselves to replenish internal losses. Yet the lure of the Romantic self remains; and In Memoriam at least manages to find it, if not necessarily to keep it. Other poems may offer less; but whether their work achieves or renounces a compensation wrought from within, Victorian poets are unique in fully exposing the psychological strain in the compensatory pattern, something they do with more candor than any Romantic poet other than Coleridge. Wordsworth himself masters that strain, and even praises it; his Victorian successors are left to grapple with it.

The 'Intimations' Ode and Victorian Romanticism

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