The best commentary on a poem is generally to be found in the poet’s other works. And those last dozen lines furnish the best commentary on that famous passage in the Ode, where the poet, looking back to his childhood, gives thanks for it,—not however for its careless delight and liberty,
| But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realised, High instincts before which our mortal Nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised. |
Whether, or how, these experiences afford ‘intimations of immortality’ is not in question here; but it will never do to dismiss them so airily as Arnold did. Without them Wordsworth is not Wordsworth.
The most striking recollections of his childhood have not in all cases this manifest affinity to the Ode, but wherever the visionary feeling appears in them (and it appears in many), this affinity is still traceable. There is, for instance, in Prelude, xii., the description of the crag, from which, on a wild dark day, the boy watched eagerly the two highways below for the ponies that were coming to take him home for the holidays. It is too long to quote, but every reader of it will remember
| the wind and sleety rain, And all the business of the elements, The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, And the bleak music from that old stone wall, The noise of wood and water, and the mist That on the line of each of those two roads Advanced in such indisputable shapes. |
Everything here is natural, but everything is apocalyptic. And we happen to know why. Wordsworth is describing the scene in the light of memory. In that eagerly expected holiday his father died; and the scene, as he recalled it, was charged with the sense of contrast between the narrow world of common pleasures and blind and easy hopes, and the vast unseen world which encloses it in beneficent yet dark and inexorable arms. The visionary feeling has here a peculiar tone; but always, openly or covertly, it is the intimation of something illimitable, over-arching or breaking into the customary ‘reality.’ Its character varies; and so sometimes at its touch the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity, melts in rapture into that infinite being; while at other times the ‘mortal nature’ stands dumb, incapable of thought, or shrinking from some presence
| Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looks That threaten the profane. |
This feeling is so essential to many of Wordsworth’s most characteristic poems that it may almost be called their soul; and failure to understand them frequently arises from obtuseness to it. It appears in a mild and tender form, but quite openly, in the lines To a Highland Girl, where the child, and the rocks and trees and lake and road by her home, seem to the poet
| Like something fashioned in a dream. |