When it first appeared at the end of William Wordsworth's Poems,
in Two Volumes (1807), the Immortality Ode was called "illegible
and unintelligible" by Wordsworth's nemesis Francis Jeffrey (qtd. in
Davidson 91). Not much more was said about it at the time, but since
then there has been a "repeated refusal by some of every generation to
read it for anything but its music and emotional power," glossing over
its meaning (Davidson 27). Even today, the critical consensus seems to
be that the Ode offers nature as consolation to existential angst. In
The Intelligible Ode, however, Graham Davidson draws on
Wordsworth's full oeuvre, from the published poems to their manuscript
revisions, in order to make Wordsworth's great ode intelligible to the
current generation of readers.
Arguing that the Immortality Ode represents "the culmination of the
poetry that both preceded and succeeded it" (79), Davidson undertakes
the monumental task of closely reading nearly all the poetry written
from 1804, when Wordsworth began writing the Ode, to 1807, when he
published it. He opens with two disclaimers. First, if there is any
theory driving his analysis, it is "that poems will provide most of
their pleasure, as well as share most of their insights, principally by
reading and reflection, by establishing connections between different
poems ... and by listening to what the author says" (1). Second, Davidson
wrote most of the book while under lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic
in 2020--22 and, consequently, often lacked access to a library. Despite
these limiting conditions, a deep intellectual curiosity clearly drives
The Intelligible Ode, a fascinating attempt to understand a
poet on his own terms.
Davidson's method combines close reading, composition history, and
biography. It is an impressive undertaking, even if the readings are
sometimes a bit strained and repetitive. Some of the repetition is
deliberate: Davidson takes into account contemporary academic habits
which tend to cannibalize books, reading individual chapters rather than
cover to cover. This is a book, however, that rewards reading the whole
thing in order. In the absence of library access, Davidson's engagement
with contemporary scholarship is wanting. The consequence is a thesis
reminiscent of those advanced by the likes of M. H. Abrams and Harold
Bloom in the 1950s--70s. However, it is important to remember that
Lutterworth Press publishes scholarly nonfiction for a general audience,
who are likely to be unfamiliar with the decade-long quarrels of
academia. Furthermore, The Intelligible Ode is the obvious
product of deep thought, an impressive range of knowledge, and sensitive
close reading. Both general and academic readers will find much to
appreciate.
Through his five sections and seventeen (short) chapters, Davidson
argues that as a child Wordsworth felt the presence of a transcendental
power--variously called mind, imagination, Reason, or eternity--which he
associated with feelings of deep love and joy. As he matured and as he
struggled with The Recluse, that great never-to-be-finished
philosophical poem that Coleridge had charged him with writing, he no
longer experienced that power in the immediacy of nature. Thus began
"Wordsworth's continuous debate with himself" (9) as he tried to
determine "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" (line 56) and whether
he could recover it. According to Davidson, Wordsworth's driving
question was whether nature or mind is the source of that elusive power.
These questions and their answers culminate in "Wordsworth's finest
expression of the lyric spirit of philosophy," moving "from dead years
and sadness to a feeling of power" (216), and cautiously concluding in
the great Ode "that grace once experienced was ineradicable" (206).
This is a familiar story to most students of Wordsworth, and seems to
replicate the Romantic Ideology identified by Jerome McGann. For
example, Davidson asserts that Wordsworth "f[ound] his freedom" in
"deeper seclusion" when he moved to Grasmere (43). However, he engages
with New Historicism only briefly to caution readers that it is
important to take Wordsworth at his word if we want to understand the
Ode as he did. Recognizing that few readers today have the same belief
systems as the Romantic poets, Davidson asserts that the "ideas and
feelings of immortality are the premises of the Ode[;] its
intelligibility depends upon readers ... suspending their rejection of
them" (97) and buying into the idea that children have access to a
celestial something that they lose as adults. Although he clearly
articulates the terms of Wordsworth's internal debate--is the return to
childhood's celestial vision "a reversion to an illusion, or a reversion
to truth" (106)?--sometimes it is difficult to tell if Davidson is merely
tracking them or trying to answer them himself.
Even so, Davidson's undertaking is impressive. In the first part of
the book, "Patterns," he establishes enduring themes in Wordsworth's
thinking and poetry--nature, human suffering, the imagination, and
transcendence--and provides a brief overview of the context in which they
were forged. René Descartes had rendered nature unintelligible, Davidson
explains, by postulating that it was lifeless and inert. Substantially
disconnected from God, nature no longer offered access to the divine.
Cambridge Platonists like Ralph Cudworth, however, found a way to
reunite mind and nature in the wake of Cartesian empiricism, asserting
that reason enabled human beings to apprehend truths that did not rely
on the sensible world. Although Davidson acknowledges that there is no
evidence that Wordsworth ever read Cudworth or any member of his circle,
he contends that the poet saw reason as a divine faculty that worked in
both the human mind and nature. He also points to geometric proofs,
which do not depend on the sensible world, as another source of
Wordsworth's fundamental belief that truth exists transcendentally.
These claims are similar to Mark J. Bruhn's in Wordsworth before
Coleridge (Routledge, 2018), though Davidson arrives at them
independently. Davidson argues that "Tintern Abbey" maps the themes that
structure Wordsworth's thought and that culminate in the Ode: the
relationship between power and phenomena, the loss of nature's
immediacy, and the possibility of recompense. For Wordsworth, the light
of sense must be extinguished before power's presence can make itself
known--not through literal death, but through the transcendence of
ordinary apprehension.
Because "ideas and feelings of immortality are the premises of the
Ode," readers need to understand what Wordsworth meant by them (Davidson
97). In "Principles," Davidson argues rather vehemently that for
Wordsworth, immortality has nothing to do with the resurrection of the
body. (Here, it feels as though Davidson is tilting at windmills, but at
the end of the book we learn that he is tilting with John Ruskin.) Like
John Davies, Wordsworth sees immortality rather as the consciousness of
an elusive power that originates in God. Like Thomas Traherne, he
experiences a sense of unity with God, mourns its loss as he gives into
the demands of adulthood, and retires to the country in an effort to
regain it. Davidson further connects both poets' ideas to what Freud
calls an oceanic state in infancy. Although Traherne was not
rediscovered until the twentieth century, Davidson discusses his
resemblance to Wordsworth with a palpable excitement that, I suspect,
partially motivated this project.
In the third section, Davidson offers an in-depth analysis of what he
calls the poetry of crisis. Wordsworth advertised Poems, in Two
Volumes as diversions. Nevertheless, Davidson contends that the
seemingly light verse written in the wake of his brother John's death,
Coleridge's removal to Malta, and his pending marriage to Mary
Hutchinson reflects his doubts about whether he had the poetic resources
to complete The Recluse. Minutely analyzing several poems about
flowers, birds, butterflies, and the singular "To H.C.," Davidson claims
that they rehearse the questions and answers that would converge with
"resolute clarity" in the Ode (156).
The fourth section devotes seven chapters to close-reading the
Immortality Ode. Wordsworth's deceptively simple syntax and imagery
belie his often-obscure meaning. Furthermore, although his use of the
present tense and irregular stanzas give the impression of dramatic
spontaneity, the poem is both structured and progressive, as the speaker
mourns the loss of the celestial vision and ponders whether power
resides in nature or in the mind. It follows the tripartite structure
that, according to Davidson, characterizes Wordsworth's pattern of
thought, opening with the statement of loss, followed by the analysis of
loss, and concluding with its tentative recovery. The adult speaker
seeks to make conscious what he knew only intuitively as a child: that
love of nature and primal sympathy in the wake of human suffering can be
rewarded with a sublime experience of power, reaffirming the belief in
something beyond mere mortal existence. This transcendent peace is the
fruit of the philosophic mind.
"Looking Forward into History," the final section, takes Wordsworth
and Coleridge to task for failing to understand the importance of the
Ode and for misreading The Prelude as a private poem, thereby
suppressing its publication until Wordsworth's death. Davidson concludes
with a conjectural publication history that asks how the reception of
the Ode might have been different if Wordsworth had published all of his
longer works when they were written--for example, Salisbury
Plain and The Borderers before Lyrical Ballads,
or The Ruined Cottage before Poems, in Two Volumes and
The Prelude shortly thereafter. Davidson speculates that
readers would have recognized two themes that dominate Wordsworth's
work: radical human sympathy and poetry that transcends suffering. The
Victorians and their successors might also not have mischaracterized
Wordsworth as a nature poet. The larger, unstated point, however, is
that only when we read Wordsworth's poetry in the order of composition
rather than publication do his metaphysics cohere. In fact, doing so
makes intelligible the famous poem that has been so much admired and so
little understood.
Davidson's book would make a useful study for undergraduates on how
to close-read and write about poetry. For more seasoned scholars,
Davidson puts Wordsworth's poems into productive relationships with each
other. Clear writing, broad biographical and other contextual
information, and colloquial asides also make this a suitable book for a
general reader who wants to know more about Wordsworth, his famous ode,
or even how literary analysis is conducted. Regardless of whether one
agrees with Davidson's argument, The Intelligible Ode presents
a fascinating example of intellectual curiosity, scholarship driven by
passion rather than necessity, and the fruits of sustained thinking
about a body of work.
Lisa
Ann Roberson is Associate Professor of English at the University of
South Dakota.
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