The Growing Pains of a Child Philosopher: Puer and Senex in The Prelude

The Growing Pains of a Child Philosopher:

Puer and Senex in The Prelude

Maria Elena Oberti

10619143

Supervisor: Dr. Rudolph Glitz

A thesis submitted to the Graduate School of Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Master of Arts degree in Literary Studies

The University of Amsterdam May 2016

The Growing Pains of a Child Philosopher:

Puer and Senex in The Prelude

The Prelude: A Story of Two Beginnings……….…….………….01

Part One: Childhood as a State of Being

i. The Boundaries of Childhood……….….05

ii. The Poet’s Quest for Self-Actualization: Recovering the Divine…….……….……11

iv. Opposing Forces: The Puer and Senex Archetypes……..……….18

Part Two: The Child is Father to the Man

v. Innocence is Dead: The Wisdom of Fear and Betrayal………26

vi. The Puer Eternus and Non-empirical Knowledge in Nature….………..………….…..…34

vii. The Circuitous Journey: Growing Up While Growing Down………..…41

Arriving at The Recluse as the Child Philosopher……….………48

Bibliography…………..………52

“Wisdom Begins in Wonder”

-Socrates

The Prelude: The Story of Two Beginnings

In a letter to De Quincey dated March 6, 1804, Wordsworth describes The Prelude “as a sort of portico to the Recluse, a part of the same building,” one that would ultimately lay the 1 foundations for his “heroic argument” (III,184) on the mind and heart of man. A “Traveller…/ Whose tale is only of himself” (III, 198-99), the poet revolves his “theme” (XIII, 240-41) around the “simple days” (VII, 333) of early childhood. Concentrating on his “own heart”, and of “[w]hat passed within me” (III, 176-78), the poet embarks on a journey through the peaks and vales of life, exploring the universal “passions that build up our human soul” (I, 407). Indeed, The

Prelude is what the esteemed nineteenth-century critic M. H. Abrams describes in his paper

“The Design of The Prelude” as the starting point of a “circuitous pilgrimage” of life. The poet’s narrative strategically takes place along Lake Derwent where the poet spent the first years of his life, and “where he has taken up residence at the stage of his life where the poem

concludes” (587). The setting is symbolic, for as Abrams explains: “the place to which the poet 2 has returned is not his literal home” but rather “his spiritual home” (595). The location is

significant for it signals not only a physical return, but a homecoming of the self. The memory of childhood not only represents a time of purity and promise, a time “when all knowledge is delight” (II, 287), but also a stage in which “infant sensibility,/ Great birthright of our being” is “[a]ugmented and sustained” (II, 270-72). As Abrams writes, the poet’s “remembrance of things past” evokes a sense of his “former self which coexists with the altered present self in a multiple awareness that Wordsworth calls ‘two consciousnesses’” (587). In the subsequent pages I will explore these twin awarenesses in an effort to demonstrate how together they form the inherent duality of the spirit and poetic genius. Centred around an immortal childlike self, the tension between the two perspectives of the soul are what ultimately lead the poet to divine insight as the sagacious and feeling poet of The Recluse.

For the purpose of this paper, I will borrow Wordsworth’s conception of the child philosopher from Ode: Intimations of Immortality and apply it to The Prelude of 1850. My

reasoning for focusing on the 1850 text as opposed to the earlier manuscripts is two-fold: as the last revised rendition of the poem, it is the most refined and furthermore the one that most closely approximates the poet’s indented masterwork. While I agree with Abram’s understanding

From The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787-1805, ed. Ernest 1

de Selincourt. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967. 454. Print.

For Abram’s “The Design of The Prelude” refer to pages 585-598 of The Prelude 1799, 1805, 2

of the achronological nature of the poem and the circularity of the poet’s journey and final spiritual ‘return’ to childhood, I nevertheless argue that the direction of the poet’s return is not limited to a cyclical loop, but instead takes the form of a far more complex evolution. Rather than a circuitous return, I instead envision the poet’s progression as an upward moving spiral. As Melvin Rader explains in his philosophical analysis of the poem “The Growth of a Poet’s Mind”, the poet’s “lower” childhood intuition “sustains the higher” faculties of reason in a process by which the higher both “includes and develops the lower” (84). My vision of the child

philosopher represents this sophisticated blend of the poet’s ‘two consciousnesses”, the childlike, true essence of the soul coupled with the matured mind of experience. I believe this union is fundamental to understanding Wordsworth’s thoughts on the human condition and is central to his poetic mission. In order to reach this state, the speaker must first endure an arduous journey of spiritual death and rebirth before reaching what Abrams describes as a “recovered paradise” (595). The poet, having retrieved a sense of his “true self” (XI, 342), does not return to childhood, but rather continues to grow as a more sapient and self-aware version of himself.

Sharing Judith Plotz’s view of an immortal, ideal Wordsworthean child, I aim to further develop and expand upon her notion of “childhood as a permanent state” by applying Hillman’s archetypal psychology to Wordsworth’s poetry, particularly his concept of the puer and senex archetypes as the twin components of the self’s perfect, or divine, image (xv). In the same way that Hillman seeks to illuminate psychology through mythology and theology, I here hope to unravel Wordsworth’s conception of the child’s “mounting spirit” (III, 504) by drawing upon psychological theory and classical philosophical discussions on the eternal child, or puer

eternus. Referring to archetypical nostalgia as the “nostalgia for an archetype” Hillman

highlights the nature of the soul’s longing for origin, an origin that is not a social or emotional construction, but one that refers to the first and highest image of the self (Senex & Puer 172). Using Hillman’s archetypal psychology as a basis for my discussion, I hope to engage in a more complex and profound analysis of the self to demonstrate the way in which Wordsworth’s poetic pilgrimage in The Prelude is less a return than an ascent to a higher plain of poetic

consciousness.

This thesis is divided into two parts: Childhood as a State of Being, and The Child is Father to the Man. The first is centred around the experience of childhood as a state of mind rather than a physiological phase, and the second on the image of the child as the foundation of the spirit. To begin, I will first give a historical account of nineteenth-century notions of the child and childhood to highlight the way in which contemporary conceptions of childhood were fluid

and not limited to a duration of time, physical maturation, or age. I explore the question of when childhood begins and/or ends and I apply this concept to Wordsworth’s own understanding of an unending childhood. I maintain that the child is not a distant, unretrievable self, but rather is an essential component of the spirit that reveals itself through the many “beatings” of the “heart” (I, 414). Thus, going against Linda M. Austin’s claim of a nostalgic, irretrievable Wordsworthian childhood in “Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy”, I instead argue for an essential and eternal child in the poem. I proceed in Chapter II to a more philosophical

interpretation of childhood where I borrow from Hillman’s theory on the soul and calling to highlight Wordsworth’s longing for self actualization. I draw parallels to Plato’s “Theory of Recollection” to demonstrate the relationship between the two consciousnesses in the poem and the poet’s “obscure sense” (II, 317) of an essential otherness. From the poet’s intuitive and deeply personal recollections, I introduce the daimonion of Plato’s Apology to give further insight into the complexity of the inner child’s nature and of the poet’s unyielding sense of poetic

purpose. I examine this calling as a call to the poet’s true image, as a “creative soul” (XII, 207), one bordering between the earthly and the divine. In the central chapters, III and IV, I structure Wordsworth’s twin consciousnesses around Hillman’s notion of the puer and senex archetypes. Together, they form a twilight state of awareness comprised of opposing yet complimentary aspects of the spirit, a consciousness equally inspired by intuition as by reason. Through a fundamental process of maturation and balancing of puer and senex sensibilities, I examine the poet’s ascent to this higher level of consciousness. I argue that the trials of life do not break, but rather sustain and cultivate his inner child through earthly experience and a senex

understanding of the world. This I highlight by way of the poet’s relation to the natural world in Chapter V, where the beautiful compliments puer consciousness and the sublime that of the senex. To conclude, I use Hillman’s theory of “growing down” to explain the mechanisms of the poet’s progression into the “feeling intellect” (XIV, 226) of a child philosopher.

PART ONE

I

The Boundaries of Childhood

In her paper “Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy” Linda M. Austin gives a historical account of the nostalgic figure of childhood in romantic literature. Describing the longing for a return to childhood as "that most romantic desire”, Austin analyses contemporary conceptions of childhood and nostalgia in nineteenth-century literature and culture, demonstrating the way in which both nostalgic and retrospective experiences of childhood coalesce to create "one of the most romantic images, the innocent child of

nature" (75). In her discussion, Austin argues that representations of childhood in nineteenth-century poetry reflect not only a disconnection between the socialized adult and the pure child of nature, but also the subjective nature of childhood as a product of an internalized experience and individual historical narrative. More significantly, Austin accentuates the romantic poet's longing as a subjective construction of the autonomous conception of childhood, one that is both free from chronological history and as unbound as it is fluid. Austin argues that the distancing between the adult poet and what she refers to as the “locus created for a former discarded self,” is due less to the corruptive and destructive influences of time, than to the nostalgic distortions of a self-serving personal narrative, one forged by the imagination and furthermore heightened by the unreliability of memory (76). Defining nineteenth-century childhood as an "ego-centric construction", one mediated by "an inchoate nostalgia" as the "experience of memory rather than its contents” (86) Austin claims that the Wordsworthean childhood of his Ode: Intimations

of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is "recalcitrant, exotic, and

unknowable” (90). While this paper argues for a knowable and attainable childhood self, Austin's claim of the nostalgic (mis)representation of childhood in Wordsworth’s poetry nevertheless opens an important discussion on the idiosyncrasy and subjective nature of the romantic, and indeed Wordsworthean, child. A discussion on the common misreading of a nostalgic

Wordsworthean child will be developed in the subsequent chapters, however for the purpose and clarity of my argument, I will reserve the current discussion on first unraveling the notion of a boundless and timeless child in romantic nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Austin's deconstruction of the romantic child as an unknowable and nostalgic figure highlights both the obscure and profoundly personal nature of the experience of childhood. Writing on the “condition of childhood”, Austin's work provides a sociological backdrop to nostalgic representations of the romantic child, as she demonstrates the way in which nineteenth-century constructions of childhood were defined not by a particular age, but

rather to a remembered (and according to her view, imagined) state of being. Defining childhood as a “condition rather than duration,” Austin notes the way in which terms relating to childhood were ambiguous, and used interchangeably to describe both children and adults alike. Indeed, as she explains, “[by] ‘child’ or ‘childhood,’ writers might have meant any period from infancy through young adulthood” (77). Rather than pointing to a particular physiological stage, the state of childhood in nineteenth-century literature and culture instead referred to a mode of being, one characterized by a general level of dependency, passivity and naiveté towards life. As Carolyn Steedman also explains in the opening to Childhood and the Idea of Human Inferiority

1780-1890, childhood “was a category of dependence, a term that defined certain relationships

of powerlessness, submission and bodily inferiority or weakness, before it became descriptive of chronological age” (7). Both youths and grown adults could be said to exhibit such behaviour. This also applies to our contemporary world, in which terms for childhood or child-like behaviour are used to describe both children and adults. To refer to an adult as child-like in our secularized society is generally a pejorative remark, one accompanied by negative connotations of

immaturity and foolishness. Such conceptions stand in contrast to past theories of childhood which instead valued childishness as an admirable, or even holy trait. As David Kennedy argues in his essay Images of the Young Child in History: English Enlightenment and Romance, each era is defined by its own interpretation or idealization of childhood, whereby:

[T]he young child becomes a sort of cultural icon for each particular historical period: for the medieval, the holy child; for the Puritan, the exemplification of original sin; for the 'enlightened' early modernist, the blank slate of drives; for the Romantic, the unity of being and knowing, or the vicissitude of instinct; for the modern liberal consciousness, the inherently good organism; and so forth. Each icon takes its distinctive configuration from a matrix of onto-epistemological

assumptions; each represents an implicit rudimentary metaphysics. (123)

History reveals diverse and often contradicting conceptions of childhood,

demonstrating that ideas of the child have little to do with factual biological aspects of childhood (as the developmental stage between birth and physiological maturity) and more to do with the varying influences of cultural and religious values regarding children in society. In his pioneering study Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of the Family of 1960, Philippe Aries unveils the cultural and historical influences of society on the family and particularly those reflecting notions of the child, claiming that history has more influence than instinct when it comes to personal relationships within the family. In the introduction to his work, Aries asks the central question of his research:

[H]ave we any right to talk of a history of the family? Is the family a phenomena any more subject to history than instinct is? Is it possible to argue that it is not, and to maintain that the family partakes of the immobility of the species? (9)

Interested in “the family as an idea”, Aries finds notions concerning familial norms and the relationships therein as being historically inconsistent. Despite these variations, Aries

nevertheless notes that the central figure of the family has nevertheless always been the child. Aries unravels the historical implications of childhood, offering the first modern study of its kind dedicated to uncovering the mystery of childhood as a distinct and unique phase of life. The first historian to examine childhood from a social perspective, Aries draws attention to the fluidity of societal interpretations of and personal relationships with childhood and the significant impact such frameworks have on literary and artistic genres.

Indeed, as Austin points out, the structure of our contemporary approach to childhood and age stands in stark contrast to the more fluid and undefined notions of age of the nineteenth-century. While her argument aims to undervalue the authenticity of the

Wordsworthean child and the child of nature in romantic literature generally, her discussion on the varying personal principles of childhood are nevertheless critical to my argument and as such require some exploration. Unlike gender politics, which since the rise of the twentieth-first century have become an important and prominent issue in contemporary political, cultural and literary theory, problems of ageism and the vital role age plays both personally and socially in the modern world has instead been confined to biological and psychological studies, which instead of expanding perspectives, limits them to rigidly categorized social normalities, each with its respective normative traits and 'disorders'. Current conceptions and biases towards age are influenced not only by our modern secularized perspective of age as a predictable

mechanical process, but furthermore by the rise of contemporary scientific and sociological studies aimed at uncovering the once mystical and mysterious nature of human life. While such investigations on the nature of human development have provided tremendous insight into the complexities of life, the desire to normalize this development has nevertheless paradoxically reenforced very limiting and rigid ways of interpreting personal age and its boundaries.

The ease and precision with which we distinguish between age groups is a product not of natural instinct, but of a socially constructed hierarchy and structure. As Austin explains, many of our ideas regarding age spring from medical and civic regulations; such norms provide the basic foundations for an age structure and the criteria from which we draw contemporary conceptions of the various phases of human development. Writing on the

psychology of the family and age in his paper “Psychological Development and Historical Change”, Kenneth Keniston stresses the way in which age structures have the tendency to "freeze its own unique experience into an ahistorical vision of Life-in-General,” disturbing an independent sense of being, which in turn causes a sense of hostility and confusion "between biologically-determined psychological maturation, socially defined age-grading, and real psychological development” (332-33). Keniston makes a clear distinction between age as the performative act of a particular socially accepted behaviour and the interiority of age as a personal and individual experienced self. Making a similar argument in The Nature of a Age

Stratification, Matilda Riley writes that

We think of the members of any given society (as "actors" engaged in social activities) as divided into strata according to their age. These strata comprise varying numbers and kinds of

people...who as individuals differ in their capacities, motivations, and strategies for performance in social roles. At any given period of time, people in different age strata must live in as members of the society, finding their place in relation to others who may be similar or different in age, and making choices. (418-19)

As members of our modern society we are both consciously and unconsciously affected by age categories and are furthermore prone to adapting to society's construction of specific ‘normative’ age behaviour. Science furthermore offers schedules and terminology that help us distinguish between the standardized biological and psychological progress of human life. Our life is, from the moment of conception, destined to proceed in an almost mechanical fashion, with every stage predetermined and regulated before the act of living even takes place. Though essential to our understanding of human development, these societal, biological and psychological normative distinctions offer little insight into the more subjective and personal experiences of age, experiences that are not limited to certain boundaries or time frames.

Writing in his best-selling book The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and

Calling, James Hillman points to this problem, claiming that modern psychology leaves little

room for the inherent inconsistencies and ‘otherness’ of the human psyche. As he argues in The

Soul’s Code and in his collection of psychoanalytic essays later published as the Puer Papers,

our internal age and sense of self is less a progression of biological and cognitive development as it is a state of psychological and spiritual being. Indeed, Hillman boldly states in the opening passage of The Soul’s Code that “there is more to human life than our theories of it allow” (3). Though modern breakthroughs in science undoubtedly shine significant light into the mysteries of the human mind, they nevertheless fail to take into account a critical aspect of an individual, personal sense of self. As Hillman explains, “today’s main paradigm for understanding a human

life, the interplay of genetics and environment, omits something essential – the particularity you feel to be you” (6). This particularity is critical to understanding Wordsworth’s conception of both himself and childhood in The Prelude, for the path that leads to the poet’s “true self” (XI, 342) to “the height of feeling intellect” (XIV, 226) is not a return to a past condition of childhood

innocence or a particular moment in his personal history, but rather refers to the unification of the mature mind with an inherent ‘child-like’ sense of self. Childhood represents not a specific time or period in life, but rather what he refers to as a feeling. It is a feeling that is both uplifting and unifying, it represents a union between the cultivated intellect and the insight of childhood intuition. To uncover the “innate image, we must set aside the psychological frames that are usually used, and mostly used up”, for indeed, “[t]hey do not reveal enough” (Hillman 5). Urging that we have been “robbed of our own biography”, Hillman claims that science has dumbed our instinctive relationship with an eternal self with theories that compartmentalize and divide the otherwise ageless and divine aspect of our individualism. Such divisions break the metaphysical unity of self into stages of past, present, and future, creating an individual sense of history that is segregated and indeed broken from the very beginning.

The temptation to interpret The Prelude’s uniquely personal depiction of the state of childhood through contemporary notions of a distant and nostalgic child threatens to distort the already complex workings of Wordsworth's philosophy of childhood and the self. Driven by a modern-day cultural and socio-historic ego-centrist attitude, Austin’s claim for an unknowable, nostalgic Wordsworthean childhood misplaces his philosophy within a contemporary theoretical framework. A model of what Hillman would criticize as the failure of secularized scientific

classifications, her categorization of childhood as a distinctly nostalgic and unknowable state confines and suffocates Wordsworth’s poetic child. What causes further problems is her misreading of Wordsworth's poetic portrayals of childhood as incoherent and independent works. While his early poems address the varying modes of childhood and childlike behaviour, Wordsworth's philosophy of the child in The Prelude instead synthesizes these portrayals. As John. T. Hiers argues in his article “Wordsworth’s Vision of Childhood: A Call for Reexamination” for the South Atlantic Bulletin, such "lack of synthesis results in an over-emphasis in the child's relationship with nature. A comprehensive examination, however, reveals the child's

transcendental mind—his innate powers to unify the world of natural mutability and to envision the eternal beauty of all life” (8). Limited interpretations like those of Austin lead to oversimplified and misinformed modern reconstructions of the complex and all but categorical Wordsworthean child. As Peter Coveney writes in his work The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society:

A Study of the Theme in English Literature, the Wordsworthean child is the "symbol of the

"the basis of a whole philosophy of human nature" (32). Despite Austin's claim of an

unknowable and inorganic, nostalgic Wordsworthean childhood, the child of both Ode and The

Prelude of 1850 is all but distant and imaginary. Using contemporary notions of an idealized

retrospective childhood and twentieth-century theories of nostalgia to analyze Wordsworth's child, Austin misinterprets and in fact entirely misses the fine philosophical and psychological intricacies of the poet's metaphysics. By limiting the breadth of Wordsworth's childhood

experience in The Prelude to the romantic child of nature and the performative child as found in some of Wordsworth's earlier poems, Austin loses sight of the greater scope of the poem's theme, further misplacing the child's relationship to and fundamental role in the development of the poet’s intuitive and intellectual powers as the ultimate child philosopher.

II

The Poet’s Quest for Self-Actualization: Recovering the Divine

Writing on nostalgia in Wordsworth’s poetry, Austin defends her reading of Ode with what she refers to as “Wordsworth’s belief of the unrecoverablility of the condition of childhood,” concluding that the poem furthermore evokes a “shared sense among adults of inevitable forgetting, of the remoteness” of a childhood self (83). While Wordsworth does draw a distinction between the unique experience of childhood and adulthood in the poem, he

nevertheless maintains that within this difference lies an essential bond that both strengthens and nurtures one in the other. Much like in Ode, the disconnect he feels between his child-like and adult self in The Prelude is symptomatic not of a lost childhood, but rather of the feelings of self-doubt and self-awareness that accompany maturation and adulthood. While Wordsworth 3 draws a distinction between the states of childhood and adulthood in The Prelude, he

nevertheless finds and maintains within his adult self a sense of his original child-like spirit, an inherent divine ‘otherness’ that is immortal and uncorrupted by time. Described as an essential presence and force that “liveth in the heart” (II, 405), this spirit reminds the poet of his divine image and pushes him to pursue his creative personal calling. Writing on the child’s proximity to the divine and the call to self actualization in The Soul’s Code, Hillman describes the pull to fulfill one’s ideal image as a “call from the heart” (9), a “feeling of uniqueness, of grandeur…a poetic basis of mind” (40). Drawing on Hillman’s depiction of the soul’s guiding spirit, or daimon – a term he borrows from Plato – I will in this chapter highlight Wordsworth’s intuitive sense of self and drive to pursue his poetic calling as an intrinsic pull towards a divine image, a calling that is furthermore not lost, but rather augmented in adulthood. Profoundly rooted in childhood, the “infant sensibility” of his original self aids the poet in retrieving a sense of his divine spirit, furthermore providing him with an inexhaustible source of inspiration and intellectual drive to pursue his epic autobiographical masterwork.

In The Soul’s Code, Hillman emphasizes the importance of a guiding inner voice in psychology, referring to one’s incorruptible and innate sense of self as the call of one’s prescribed daimon spirit. Originating in ancient Greek mythology, daimonen were invisible entities or spirits possessing both divine and mortal characteristics. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates refers to the daimon as an internal voice, as “something divine and spiritual” that comes to him when he is in solitude (Apology, 31d). Assigned to him by the gods, this guardian spirit silently

The distinction and relationship between the child and adult self will be discussed in detail in the

3

advises Socrates from the moment of his birth to his death, protecting him from harm and reminding him of his heavenly origins. Comparing the daimon to the god Eros in the

Symposium, Plato describes the quiet messenger as “a great spirit…for all the spiritual is

between divine and mortal” (Symposium, 201A-202D). Emerging from within as the voice of conscience, the daimon directs human thought through intuition and feeling; the intermediary between the earthy and celestial world, the daimon furthermore relates one with the other for “being in the middle it completes them and binds them together into a whole” (Symposium, 202 d-e); as the mediator between man and God, the daimon furthermore communicates and reveals the hidden truths of divinity, and as a consequence, the mystery of one’s own celestial spirit, for as Sedley explains in his essay “Plato’s Cratylus", “the word daimon itself has as its root the notion of intelligence or understanding, being derived from daemon, ‘knowing’, as is confirmed by our tendency to call good and wise human beings daimonioi, ‘brilliant’, especially those skilled in communication with the divine” (38-39). The daimon – the messenger of the divine and the influencer of the individual’s perfect image – pushes the mind beyond the limitations of the human condition, taking the soul to the heights of heaven.

In his book, Hillman describes the daimon as a creative source of inspiration and the guardian of the self, insisting that we “are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians” upon our birth (7). He refers to this inner force or brilliance as our “essential image” (7), “that particularity that you feel to be you” (6). Distinguishing between the act of building one’s life “biography” and that of truly being, Hillman writes how the daimon evokes a sense of otherness in the heart, one that persists “with stubborn fidelity” to help bring forth the divine image of the self (39). Differentiating between the daimon and the person possessing it, Hillman maintains that the two, though related, nevertheless remain distinct, claiming that the “the genius or daimon or angel is an invisible nonhuman escort, not the person with whom the genius lives” (29). Nevertheless, in its essential otherness, the daimon awakens a sense of one’s origin, of a divine self that pre-exists this world and one’s birth. Wordsworth addresses the mystery of his own daimon early on in The Prelude, where he claims to feel an inexplicable and unique guiding inner presence: experiencing a sense of distance between his childhood self and the self he recognizes in the present, the poet reflects how:

A tranquilizing spirit presses now, On my corporeal frame, so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days Which yet have such self-presence in the mind. That musing on them, often do I seem

And of some other Being. (II, 27-33)

Feeling a disconnect between the man he has grown into and the person he feels in his heart, the poet is troubled by a sense of duplicity. Yet, despite having moved from childhood into adulthood, the poet has not lost his ability to be in touch with his inner nature, what he also refers to as “the first/ Poetic spirit of our human life.” Though “[i]n most, abated or suppressed”, this sense of self remains for him “Pre-eminent till death” (II, 261-65). The “self-presence” the poet feels is what Hillman defines as the daimon; it is the inner voice, the intuitive feeling that awakens a sense of self beyond this world. Experienced as an estranged, yet all but too familiar inner voice, this “other Being” recognizes who and what the poet is, reminding him that not all is lost; for though the “props” of his childhood self have weakened, the poet’s intrinsic “infant sensibility,/Great birthright of our being”, nevertheless persists, “as if sustained/By its own spirit” (II, 270-81).

Central to Wordsworth’s conception of the child in both The Prelude and Ode is the notion of the pre-existence of the soul. Referring to birth as “but a sleep and a

forgetting” (Ode, 59), Wordsworth’s depiction of childhood in both The Prelude and the Ode bears a striking resemblance to Plato’s “Theory of Recollection” as discussed in his fourth dialogue, Phaedo. Facing execution, Socrates contemplates the existence of the soul, putting into question the nature of life and death and the origin of being. After a lengthly debate on the Forms and the imperishability of the soul, Socrates concludes that the soul precedes life on earth, and as a consequence comes into this world possessing its share of the divine and non-empirical knowledge. Concluding that “our souls existed long ago, before they were in human shape, apart from bodies, and then had wisdom” (573), Socrates argues that while we lose part of that wisdom at birth, we nevertheless possess the unique ability to recollect and “recover the knowledge” through the senses. The act of learning is according to this theory an act of

remembering. This remembering is not only a rediscovery of knowledge, but also of the self, as

the validation of the soul’s divinity. As Bennett Weaver cautions in his paper “Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’: The Poetic Function of Memory,” if we as readers “watch shrewdly and remember always that we are reading poetry about the growth of a poetic mind, we shall understand why Wordsworth ‘took hold of the notion of pre-existence,’ using it as a machine to move ‘the world of his own mind.’” As is the case for Hillman, the “thought of Plato was for him a mere

convenience in explanation; the comprehension of the higher reaches of poetic memory was his own” (561).

According to Plato’s philosophy, the child comes into the world possessing the key to transcendental knowledge. He does not come alone however, for he is guided by a

guardian daimon spirit who leads him through memory and intuition on his unique spiritual and earthly quest. The child, with his soul fresh out of the gates of heaven, and his mind yet

untouched by the corruption of the world, is able (through the purity of his senses) to perceive the “celestial light” (Ode, 4) that surrounds him and the divinity with which he partakes.

Wordsworth recalls in Book II of The Prelude how, as a child, he felt the pulse of a divine nature, “[by] inward concords, silent, unobtrusive/ And gentle agitations of the mind” (297-98), claiming that his soul:

Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not, retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity. (316-18)

“[H]eaven-born” (Ode, 127), the child loses sight of his divinity through the soul’s incarnation and fusion with the body, consequently forgetting his origin and inherent divinity. Despite being unaware of his godliness, the child nevertheless possesses in his heart the impression of eternity, an image of his original divine self. The child, “in the process of arrival” forgets “all that took place” believing that he came into the world empty and alone (Hillman, 8). Yet, the daimon helps him remember through feeling and intuition; the child as such “retains an obscure

sense” (The Prelude, I. 317) of his origin. In a moment of moral and emotional weakness, the poet in Ode feels severed from the vividness of his childhood self. The passage of time has stripped away the “glory from the earth” (18). The speaker’s “thought of grief” is immediately remedied by “[a] timely utterance”, however, one that just as instantaneously “[gives] that thought relief”; an inner voice calms the poet’s nerves, “And I am again strong” (22-23). The daimon has spoken. Alleviating the poet of life’s burdens and the imagined barrier between his adult and child-like self, the inner spirit reawakens the “vision splendid” (74) of childhood. The poet as a consequence once again experiences the earthly world with all the intensity and glory of his early childhood. Born “[n]ot in entire forgetfulness,/ And not in utter nakedness” (63-64), the poet “sees”, “hears”, and indeed “feels it all” (42), as he is reminded by his daimon spirit of what he has forgotten: his divine image, his “heart of hearts” (194).

Essential to Hillman’s notion of the daimon, is its relation to childhood and destiny. In the introduction to The Soul’s Code, Hillman acknowledges the importance of the voice of the daimon, describing it as an inexplicable force, a push from within, a “something” that “calls us onto a particular path”. Emphasizing the importance of child intuition, he explains how special attention must be paid to child impulses: “we must attend very carefully to childhood to catch early glimpses of the daimon in action, to grasp its intentions and not block its way” (8), for the daimon’s nature is “shadowy, revealing itself mainly in hints, intuitions, whispers” and

spontaneous urges (10). Remembering the perfect image of the self and its destiny, the daimon “not only pushes from a beginning, but also pulls towards an end” (196), “sensing itself [both] in lonely exile and in cosmic harmony” (40). Early in The Prelude, Wordsworth is confronted in his solitude by an inner voice that drives him to pursue his “honourbale toil” (I, 626). Indeed, Book I opens with what the poet describes as a sudden breeze that inspires him, an impulse that urges him to pursue his creative endeavour. To the poet, the subtle “Traces of thought” (I, 19) come to him as “[a] visitant that while he fans my cheek/Doth seem half-conscious of the joy he

brings” (I, 1-2). As Abrams writes, “[d]uring this walk an outer breeze, ‘the sweet breath of Heaven’ evokes a ‘corresponding mild creative breeze’ in the poet, a prophetic spiritus or inspiration which assures him of his poetic vocation and, though fitful, eventually leads to his undertaking The Prelude itself” (587). Not coincidentally, Hillman explains how the daimon spirit “like an annunciation” comes to the self in moments of solitude or uncertainty, reminding it of what it is, insisting that “this is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am” (3). Serving as the voice of both personal and creative inspiration, the daimon awakens “the mind’s/ Internal echo” and urges the poet to fulfil and play out his unique and individual calling with the determination of “[a] renovated spirit singled out…for holy services” (I, 53-6).

Wordsworth’s intuitive sense of his predestined poetic purpose is a reoccurring theme in The Prelude; indeed the poem itself is the very manifestation of his attempt to fulfil his calling. The precursor to his intended life’s work The Recluse, The Prelude provides a window into the poet’s state of mind as he struggles to work towards his final “philosophic song” (I, 229). Commenting on the poet’s pull towards this destiny, M. H. Abrams remarks how “[a]t Cambridge he had reached a stage of life, ‘an eminence’ in which he had felt he was ‘a chosen Son’” (589). The poet has a similar revelation during an evening walk, where he intuits the enormity of his divine calling: fuelled by the flame of his destiny, the poet recounts being overcome by a sense of purpose, as he exclaims:

Ah! need I say, Dear Friend! that to the brim My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit. On I walked

In thankful blessedness, which yet survives. (IV, 333-38)

The undying urge to follow his poetic calling and pursue his divine image persists from childhood to adulthood, for as the poet goes on to proclaim in Book VI:

The Poet’s soul was with me at that time; Sweet meditations, the still overflow Of present happiness, while further years Lacked not anticipations, tender dreams, No few of which have since been realised

And some remain, hopes for my future life. (VI, 42-7)

Arising from within as the spark of inspiration, the poet describes being enlightened by a vivid sense of “unknown” purpose. The pull towards his poetic destiny is made evident early in the poem and persists to its end; for even at “Four years and thirty”, the poet claims in Book V how, “By sorrow not unsmitten… Life’s morning radiance hath not left the hills,/ Her dew is on the flower” (VI, 48-51). The call to himself as the destined “Poet soul” of the The Recluse does not fade with the passage of time, but rather is augmented and later self sustained as he learns to follow and cultivate his inner intuitions, those which “also first emboldened” him to “trust/ With firmness, hitherto but lightly touched” his unique calling, “that I might leave/Some monument behind me which pure hearts/Should reverence” (VI, 52-7).

Bridging the gap between the mortal world and the divine, the Wordsworthean child (much like the daimon) lives in a state of “inbetweeness,” in a “midway residence” (III, 524) between heaven and earth. Having come into the world “on clouds of glory” from “God who is our home” (Ode, 65-66), the child furthermore represents our first and last earthly connection to the divine. The child as a consequence possesses what the poet refers to as man’s first creative faculties, an “infant sensibility” (II, 270), and “visionary power” (II, 311) that supports and pushes the mind on its destined journey to transcendental self knowledge. While the child descends from the divine, his earthly journey does not necessarily lead him on downward path. Birth and growth are not degenerative. Rather, the nature and innate drive of child intuition pulls the human heart upward to the heights of the soul’s divine image in heaven. While the poet recognizes a distinction between his child and adult self, he nevertheless intuits an undying inner spirit of his divine image, a sense of self which is bound to childhood and does not fade with age. Much like Plato and Hillman’s concep of the daimon, this intuition exists out of time, for “the innate image of your fate holds all in the correspondence of today, yesterday, and

tomorrow” (Hillman, 7). Even in his moments of doubt, the poet nevertheless retains a sense of an internal character, an ideal self that beats within the heart. This feeling comes to the poet as “remembrances”, urging him to remain faithful to his unique calling and character. The call, though faint and foreign, nevertheless fights resiliently for the soul’s quest for self actualization; perceived as an otherness, it persists with urgency for “this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying” (Hillman, 12). The carrier and seed of destiny, the child is thus not

merely the symbol of innocence and literary inspiration for Wordsworth, but rather the source of poetic and personal insight, for indeed “Heaven lies about us in our infancy” (Ode, 67).

Possessing an intuitive sense of his divine origin, Wordsworth’s inner child is the torchbearer of spiritual illumination, possessing the inexhaustible flame of its celestial being, the daimon or timeless spirit of the poet’s original and ultimate self.

III

Opposing Forces: The Puer and Senex Archetypes

In the paper “Is The Prelude a Philosophical Poem?”, W. B. Gallie examines the manner in which the poet “grapples with philosophical problems” in the poem (124). The fruit of his struggle for self-actualization, the autobiographical epic spurs the exploration of fundamental questions regarding existence and artistic genius. Gallie’s inquiry leads him to the discovery of two opposing elements in Wordsworth’s poetic vision: “on the one hand the spontaneous receptivity and response characteristic of childhood and on the other hand the self mastery, the calm of mind, the conscientiousness of the mature artist” (126). By reading the poet’s internal “split” through the lens of Hillman’s study on the puer and senex in archetypal psychology, we gain a more complex understanding of the poet’s conflicting characteristics and their

relationship to one another; the puer and senex archetypes not only help us better comprehend the play between the child and sage, innocence and wisdom, feeling and intellect in the poem, but they furthermore aid in establishing a more coherent vision of the poet’s ideal poetic state of mind. The discordant yet complementing senex and puer archetypes represent the complexities of Wordsworth’s essential and poetic self; together they make up a single, unified whole, for as Glen Slater writes in his introduction to Hillman’s Puer Papers, “these diverging, conflicting tendencies are ultimately interdependent, forming two faces of one configuration” (viii). According to Hillman, the twin traits persist throughout the course of life, and as such, also pervade the poem’s fourteen Books as the poet struggles to balance and find a correlation between “past and future, old and new” (Senex & Puer 27); indeed as Gallie notes, “such a perfect union of spontaneity and discipline may be impossible, but Wordsworth knew from his own experience… that in his life something like it had taken place.” This realization as a consequence leads the poet to “look for the external, as well as the internal, conditions in his own life, which had made this possible” (126).

In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman introduces his archetypical perspective of psychology as one guided by myth and the imagination. Merging psychology with religion, Hillman paints an ever-evolving picture of the soul. Taking from C. G. Jung’s archetypal

psychology, Hillman’s theory of mythical archetypes places the soul, rather than the ego, at the centre of human consciousness and psychological development. The key archetypes of his “Puer Papers” in Senex & Puer and his later work The Soul’s Code are the puer and senex. In emphasizing the need for soul in psychology, he develops the image of the immortal child of 4

For an in depth discussion on his psychology of the soul refer to Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology.

innocence and intuitive knowledge. This child archetype, or puer, is the undying inner child which we carry in our hearts from infancy to old age. It is a frail and feeling spirit that is

impulsive, intuitive, irrational, and infinitely youthful. The puer is the internal echo that pushes us to pursue our dreams, to live through the imagination, and to remain faithful to intuition. It will not bow down to the rational mind, or take the easy route; it provides a vertical link with the spiritual; it is the “dynamic seed of spirit”. Much like the daimon, it insists on being heard; it cannot resist its intuitions, despite its incapacity to comprehend the significance underlying them. The senex by contrast takes on the mythical image of Saturn; he is the archetype of the old wise man, the king, the solitary sage and prophet that instead pushes for discipline, tradition, rationality and analytical thought (Senex & Puer 38). Hillman shows how personifications of the senex principle appear in literary and religious tradition “as the holy or old wise man, the

powerful father or grandfather, the great king, ruler, judge, ogre, counsellor, elder, priest, hermit, outcast, cripple.” Some other symbols are “the rock, the old tree, particularly the oak” (Senex &

Puer 243). Like two sides of a coin, the puer and senex archetypes are co-dependant,

revealing themselves in bursts and in fragmented recollections. The two balance and counter-balance one another, each with its capacity to bring out the unique negative and positive impulses of their respective archetype. Despite their rival natures, one cannot exist without the 5 other. With “intuition at war with tuition” (The Soul’s Code 101) the key, as Hillman writes, is to arrive at a harmony, or “a union of sames” (Senex & Puer 54), to diffuse the split, to recognize the inherent union and significance of the puer-et-senex bond and live through them each in equal measure.

The problem of age in Wordsworth’s poetry is less a question of time – as the passing from one age to another – than it is of a psychological and philosophical union between two states of mind, one ‘young’ and one ‘old’. The Prelude is loaded with metaphorical and symbolic references to aging and old age. The stages of life play an important role as we follow the poet as he transitions from the “common inexperience of youth” (VI, 108) to embodying the cultivated “feeling intellect” (XIV, 226) of the later Books, one that is equally “inspiring” as “inspired” (VIII, 479). Autobiographically speaking, the first half of The Prelude focuses chiefly on the poet’s infancy and youth, whereas the latter Books tackle topics of his adult life and travels abroad. While this split divides the stages of the poet’s progress into a first and second half, this division is merely chronological, not spiritual or psychological, for as Hillman writes, “[f]irst-half and

While the puer symbolizes a push for spontaneity, newness, and intuition, it’s negative characteristics

5

involve the worst in puerility: impulsivity, irrationality and instability. The senex, symbol of wisdom and self-control, is less mercurial and more rational than the puer. The senex’s negative attributes include close-mindedness, over-rationality and rigidity. For more on the positive and negative characteristics of the puer and senex see Hillman’s paper “Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present”.

second-half pertains to kinds of consciousness, not to periods” (Senex & Puer 260). The poet shares similar sentiments in Book II where he contemplates the structure of the mind:

But who shall parcel out His intellect by geometric rules,

Split like a province into round and square? Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown, even as a seed? Who shall point as with a wand and say ‘This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain?’ (203-210)

The poet thus puts into question the origins of intellect, for much like a river, he perceives the stream of consciousness as one fed by multiple “fountains”. The river is a reoccurring image in the poem symbolizing the progress of the poet’s mind, as it is “turned and returned” (IX, 8) from present to past, between a puer and senex consciousness. This progress is indeed what ultimately enables him to reach his destination as – to borrow from Ode – the feeling intellect of a philosopher child. It is worthwhile here to note that the faculties of “intellect” are synonymous with the spiritual in the poem. The poet uses both the terms interchangeably to express the design of a “genial” frame of mind, one equally inspired by spiritual as it is by intellectual powers. In Book XIV the poet explains how “spiritual Love” (188) and “intellectual Love” (207) 6 come together in a unified “stream” (194) of divine poetic consciousness; together they form a unified body of water, an ocean of depth, comparable to “Eternity, and God” (205). Yet, to exist with the divine is to exist without time, and thus without “geometric divisions”, and furthermore without age. For the soul (also anima and psyche) , as Hillman argues, “is neither young nor old 7 – or it is both” (Senex & Puer 32). Like the daimon, the soul exists in this world as the “third factor”, it exists “half-way between Heaven and Hell, spirit and flesh, inner and outer” (36). For, as Wordsworth affirms in Book VI, “whether we be young or old”, “[o]ur destiny, our being’s heart and home/Is with infinitude” (VI, 603-605).

Despite its relation to the temporal, earthly world, the soul belongs to eternity and to the “invisible world” (VI, 602) of the divine, and as such is ageless, for it is all generations and thus all ages at once. The scope of The Prelude is to arrive at this ultimate state of agelessness, a state that Hillman refers to as a puer-et-senex state of “ambivalence”, or a “twilight state” of

See the Norton Anthology’s footnote for “intellectual power” in line 45 of Book XII

6

For Hillman’s discussion on the spirit and soul, refer to the essay “Peaks and Vale”

multiplicity (Senex & Puer 36). In order for the poet to become the ultimate “sensitive being, a

creative soul” (XII, 207) he must achieve a unifying harmony of mind, one equally

“inspiring” (one as imaginative and intuitive as that of a child’s) as “inspired” (one enlightened by a matured and pious intellect, as that of the sage). As Hillman remarks in The Soul’s Code, creative “genius is not bound by age” (17). Traits of the imaginative and contemplative mind are present during all stages of life, and consequently run through both ‘halves’ of the poet’s

biographical account. For, to borrow Hillman’s words:

The second-half is with us from the beginning, as is Saturn in our birth charts, just as the little boy and his question ‘why,’ the child Eros, and the winged angel are with us to the last. The puer inspires the

blossoming of things; the senex presides over the harvest. But flowering and harvest go on intermittently throughout life. (Senex & Puer 33)

However, as the author warns in his interview with Laura Pozzo, “[w]e live in a terrible

split” (Senex & Puer 312); the polarity between youth and old age, puer and senex, is a cultural phenomena of a society locked up by definitions, “[w]hereby society has parted man/From man and “neglect[ed] the universal heart” (The Prelude, XIII 219-20). The split is caused by the “false secondary power” (II, 216) typical of the negative senex, one “who see[s]/ By artificial

lights” (XIII, 209-20) and “multipl[ies] distinctions” (II, 217), dividing the world up into categories, of young and old, earthy and divine, ignorance and wisdom; one who can no longer perceive the hidden intricacy of things.

There are moments in the poem when the poet feels the conflicting characteristics and impulses of age, from his puerile disinterest and detachment “from academic cares” (VI, 26) at Cambridge, a time in which “other passions” ruled, making the poet “less prompt/To in-door study than was wise or well” (III, 369-71), to the senex contempt and disillusionment he feels towards the failed ideals of the French revolution, where with “disappointment sore” (XI, 212) he questions how “wisdom could, in any shape, come near/ Men clinging to delusions so

insane?” (XI, 45-46). The opposition between his childish and so-called jaded inclinations are representations of the puer-senex split, one that focuses solely on differences, for as Hillman explains, it is “impossible to say good of one without saying bad of the other as long as the two remain in polar opposition, as long as the ego wears only one face” (Senex & Puer 35). The poet’s disillusionment with the French Revolution shows clear symptoms of the “negative senex”, the hardened old man who has been “split from its own puer aspect. He has lost his ‘child’” (Senex & Puer 43); he has lost faith in humanity and as a consequence himself, for without the child there is no “spiritual drive, no new sparks, no going beyond the given, no grandeur and sense of personal destiny” (Senex & Puer 80). In like manner, his childish

rejection of his academic responsibilities and routine are symptomatic of the negative puer, of an impulsive childlike spirit, one “helpless as fail” (II, 253), and easily “disturbed at times by prudent thoughts” (II, 77). Order threatens the “eagerness of infantine desire” (II, 26) in the same way that passion contradicts the sensible and reflective “pious mind” (II, 420). While the poet undoubtedly recognizes the contradictions between child and adult awarenesses, the so-called split reveals a concentration of one of the twin faces.

Musing on his infant sensibility in Book VI, the poet reflects how “pleasures gathered from the rudiments/ Of geometric science” (115-117) were valuable to him in adolescence. The senex characteristics of intellect, science and mathematical reasoning are esteemed as vital components to the intuitive power of youth, for:

More frequently from the same source I drew A pleasure quiet and profound, a sense Of permanent and universal sway, And paramount belief; there recognized A type, for finite natures, of the one Supreme Existence, the surpassing life Which — to the boundaries of space and time, Of melancholy space and doleful time,

Superior, and incapable of change, Nor touched by welterings of passion — is, And hath the name of God. (VI, 129-41)

In this passage, the poet considers the way in such “finite natures” gave his young mind

something to look forward to. Though he could not yet understand the intricacies of the physical world, he nevertheless recognized that science would in time give his intuitions concrete

evidence of an abstract existence. Even as a child the poet recognized that his intuitions lacked the sophistication of a scientific, rational mind, for while the child represents “the first/ Poetic spirit of our human life” (II, 261-62), “infant sensibility” (II, 270) alone is not enough to reach or fully grasp the “surpassing life” of a “Supreme Existence.” Like the daimon, the puer gives the soul a “sense of destiny and mission, of having a message and being meant as eternal cup-bearer to the eternal” (Senex & Puer 49-50): while the child spirit sets the foundation for higher poetic insight, child sensibility alone will not suffice, for as the poet writes, the “first-born

affinities” (I, 555) of the child requires the analytical aptitude, the “riper mind” (I, 236) of its other half, the senex. Here again, Hillman elaborates: “The high God of our culture is a senex god; we

consciousness is inescapably senex,” and as such the capacity to comprehend the soul’s relationship to the divine is also a senex quality, one that comes with the age and as a result of the cultivated mind (Senex & Puer 243). Indeed, “[h]istory” is the senex shadow of the puer, giving him substance” (Senex & Puer 59).

As Gallie argues in his inquiry into Wordsworth’s philosophy of the “very heart” (XIII, 241) and “true end of man” (137), the poet makes a distinction between two opposing yet

fundamental characteristics of the ultimate poetic self; these characteristics, “spontaneity and discipline” – or to use Hillman’s terms, puer and senex – are acknowledged as inter-dependant elements of the true “art” of poetic inspiration and being (126). In the introduction to Hillman’s

Senex & Puer, Glen Slater explains how “this unification is not so much a marriage of opposites

as a confluence of consciousness – a dance of attitudes and sensibilities” (xi). The human condition however makes such a union impossible, for like all aspects of the soul and the divine, this “productive harmony” belongs to the perfect self and as such cannot be actualized in this world. A “perfect union” may be beyond human grasp, yet Wordsworth nevertheless sensed the potential for a near union, or what Hillman calls, a possible rapprochement, for indeed

“something like it had taken place” in his life (Gallie 126). The split between the inherent child-sage dynamic is a consequence of the Fall; it is our condition on earth that separates us from our completeness, our perfect image. As Hillman remarks, “rapprochement” is to return “to the original condition of the archetype before it has been broken apart and turned against

itself” (35). This closeness to the ideal form is what the author calls the “twilight state”, a state of ambivalence, between both puer and senex, for “ambivalence is natural, as the necessary concomitant to the ambiguity of psychic wholeness whose light is in a twilight state.” To live in ambivalence is to live “where yea and nay, light and darkness”, puer and senex, “are held closely together and difficult to distinguish”; it “places us within symbolic reality where we perceive both faces at once even exist as two realities at once” (36-37). Paradoxically, earthly life is essential to the mastery of ambivalence, for it is indeed only from experience that “the mind/Learns…to keep/In wholesome separation the two natures,/ The one that feels, and the other that observes” (XIV. 344-47). Despite being out of time, the soul requires time on earth to regain its divine image. This act of growing up by growing down, reaching the heavens while looking to the earth, will be developed further in the following section, however it is important here to keep in mind that “growth” for the poet is less a question of age than it is a progress and interplay between two states of mind.

Writing in his introduction to Senex et Puer , Glen Slater defines Hillman’s archetypal psychology as a “psychology of perspectives,” one that sets the basis for “a psyche-logical view

of the spirit” (xix). Much like Wordworth’s poetry, Hillman’s archetypical psychology too stays “close to emotion, fantasy, and metaphor, to the more poetic and imaginative basis of mind, his ideas stir the heart while waking the intellect” (viii). As Gallie writes, the philosophical

achievement of The Prelude lies in “its passion, its humanity, its conscientious realism” and by its capacity “to shift the emphasis and orientation of some of the basic notions we use in everyday life” (664). Viewing the past while simultaneously looking towards the future,

Wordsworth’s philosophical and psychological quest in The Prelude, emphasizes the struggle between “two consiousnesses”, between a child and adult self, of a “Genius, born to thrive by interchange/Of peace and excitation” (XIII, 5-6). The distinction between child and adult sensibility is problematized in the poem as the poet recognizes the fundamental connection between both aspects of his inner being. This distinction – between a calm intellectual insight, and the spark of a youthful spirit – is what Hillman defines as the puer-senex dynamic. The goal for both the poet and psychologist is to achieve an ideal and essential “union of “sames” as the self’s original state of perfect divine ambivalence. This union, as Hillman explains, is the ideal poetic state of mind, whereby one gains an ultimate “spiritual point of view” (Senex & Puer 57). Indeed, reflective in Book XIV of how he was able to overcome his internal split, “[u]nchecked by innocence too delicate,/And moral notions too intolerant”, the poet concludes that the scope of life is to “stand up/Amid conflicting interests, and the shock/ Of various tempers” and to “endure and note/What was not understood, though known to be” (333-36).

PART TWO

IV

Innocence is Dead: The Wisdom of Fear and Betrayal

In his paper “The Design of The Prelude”, Abrams explores the structure of the poem as he traces Wordsworth’s creative and mental progress through what he refers to as the poet’s “self-educative journey” (592). Abrams identifies three phases in the poem, concentrating his argument however around a critical central stage characterized by what he identifies as a pivotal moment of personal crisis. This crucial middle step not only individuates the speaker of the first books of The Prelude from the poet of the concluding verses, one “sanctified/By reason, blest by faith” (XIV, 447-48), but furthermore serves as the bridging point that sends the mind to the heights of an enlightened poetic state. Abrams finds in the experience of human suffering a fundamental source of strength that is essential to the poet’s creative and personal growth. While the experience of disillusionment and betrayal is universal to all, the act of overcoming an emotional or psychological collapse is not only what distinguishes the man from the child, but furthermore the wise from the broken. Structuring the poem around distinctive “spots of

time” (XII, 209), the poet not only provides reference points from which to track his personal and poetical development, but in doing so furthermore reveals the educative power of suffering and remembering. Pain serves not only as a creative stimulus for the young poet (liberating him from his puerile innocence), but also as a renewing source of inspiration and insight. Contemplating life from the point of view of experience, the aged Wordsworth draws strength and wisdom from the past, finding that in life, all is “gratulant, if rightly understood” (XIV, 389). In the following pages I will draw on Hillman’s theories on betrayal to further develop Abram’s argument on the creative potential of Wordsworth’s struggle. I will focus primarily on the poet’s reaction to the failure of the French Revolution as the defining moment in the poem, one that defines and distinguishes the youthful poet from the matured creative mind of The Recluse.

Writing on the importance of grief in his essay “Betrayal”, Hillman highlights the significance of pain in psychology, dignifying the universal – yet fundamentally individual – experience as the passage into existence and meaning. In his paper, Hillman concentrates on the positive potential of pain, demonstrating the way in which the experience of disillusionment ultimately pushes the intellect out of its native ignorance to pursue a more holistic perspective of existence. Grouping all ruptures of trust under the umbrella ‘betrayal’, Hillman’s discussion shines a positive light on negative experience. His conception of betrayal goes beyond inter-personal relations to include self-betrayal and the individual’s internal disillusionment with the realities of the world; betrayal as such refers to a general uncertainty with existence. Comparing

the experience of lost trust in childhood to the fall from Eden, Hillman relates the moment of emotional crisis to that of a rebirth; prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve lived in a state of blissful naiveté, a state established on what the author refers to as “primal trust”, or “a fundamental belief – despite worry, fear, or doubt – that the ground underfoot is really there, that it will not give way at the next step, that the sun will rise tomorrow and the sky not fall on our heads, and that God truly did make the world for mankind” (Senex & Puer 187). The archetypal image of human ignorance and innocence, Eden represents a state before life; it refers to a passive non-existence, a stagnant state void of responsibility, and as such, meaning. Hillman ennobles the ‘negative’ emotions inflicted by a loss in trust and internal or inter-personal disillusionment as essential life-sustaining determinants, for “the situation of primal trust is not viable for life,” it stands in opposition to it, to both the experience of a conscious awareness and the freedom that comes along with it. It is only after the Fall that man truly begins to experience the true art of living, for a fall from innocence is what inspires the intellect to question itself and the world around it, taking the mind beyond its human limitations towards the understanding of a greater and more complex whole. Adam had to be betrayed in order for mankind to understand the significance of faith and trust, just as the child must experience the pains of earthly life before he can appreciate a life before it. There is not light without darkness, in the same way, as Hillman explains, that there cannot be a puer spirit without the senex. Indeed “the morning comes/ From out the bosom of the night” (The Prelude X, 580-81). Entry into the harsh realities of the senex world highlight the puer within, for without betrayal and the corruptive forces of adult life there can be no sense of the inner child, and thus no sense of the “inmost soul” (The Prelude X, 131) of one’s essential being.

Idealizing human suffering as a creative stimulus, Hillman finds in the negative experience of a “broken promise or broken trust” the key catalyst for a breakthrough into “another level of consciousness”, one that stimulates an awakened sensibility to an alternative reality (Senex & Puer 190). Shattered by the disillusionment of betrayal, the individual must recollect and restructure his vision of the world; he must “resurrect himself, take a step forward, through his own interpretation of what happened” (Senex & Puer 199). This effort to derive meaning from the irrationality of pain is what distinguishes the senex from the puer, it represents a blossoming of the child seed into adult life, marking the moment from which our simplest human nature, the part of us that “contains the best and the least in us” (Senex & Puer 188) is driven out of blind ignorance into an illuminated state of higher insight. This hard initiation into “adult tragedy” is, as Hillman explains, the “boy’s initiation into life” (Senex & Puer 191); it is there that he must learn to create and support his own ideas on the meaning of things. This is the precisely path to poetic and personal wisdom that Abrams explores in his essay, where he

argues that the poet “resolves a central problem which has been implicit throughout The

Prelude – the problem of how to justify the human experience of pain and loss and

suffering” (589). In his attempt to trace the “heart of man” (XIV, 241) Wordsworth must first unravel the most universal and transformational of human experiences. As Weaver elaborates in “Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’: The Poetic Function of Memory”:

Wordsworth is too shrewd to presume for a moment that anything other can be the case with the artist. It is the one who does not reflect upon the true nature of the mind who does to see that each possible fact is a dead, disconnected, and essentially unknowable thing; that it can take on being and significance only when the mind gives it meaning; and that the process of giving meaning to bygone facts is just the process of recollection which Wordsworth described. (577)

Together with the uncertainty of adult life, memory works as a “living power, an agency of creative genius,” one that reveals his inner nature and furthermore allows him to re-assess and make sense of the past (Weaver 557). This act of remembering and finding meaning in turn expands the poet’s mind to consider a greater unity; it opens his eyes to a poetic wholeness of existence that in his is former state of unreflective innocence was, though perceived, non-contemplative and thus incomplete.

The poet’s extensive discussion of his early enthusiasm for and subsequent

disillusionment with the political activities in France is a reoccurring and dominant theme in the poem, one that spans the greater portion of the central books of The Prelude and furthermore divides the poem into two spheres: the first pre-Revolution half representing a time of youth and freedom, and the second post-Revolution period as a time of reflection and enlightenment. Emerging as defining illuminations, or “spots of time”, the poet uses the motif of memory in the poem to focus on the experiences that Abrams highlights as “significant for his evolution toward an inherent end.” The poet thus furthermore organizes “his life around an event which he regards as the spiritual crisis not of himself only, but of his generation: that shattering of the fierce loyalties and inordinate hopes for mankind which the liberal English — and European — intellects had invested in the French Revolution” (589). Emphasizing the importance of memory in Book XII, Wordsworth writes how

There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence, depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,