The 'Ode to Duty' and the Idea of Human Solidarity

To suggest the origins of Wordsworth's later idea of community, I will trace a progression of his thinking about the freedom of the imagination and the opposition between imagination and duty: a dominant concern of his poetry in the decade 1798-1807. I concentrate on the years 1802-04 because this shorter interval exhibits the development in concentrated form. To generalize: some poems of this period look backward to imagination, others look forward to duty, and there are some, like "Resolution and Independence," which seem to look both ways at once. I divide Wordsworth's movement from imagination to duty into five phases. These do not correspond to chronology in any reliable sequence of months, years, groups of poems or published volumes; but the development is steady and all in one direction: Wordsworth could no more have written "To the Cuckoo" in 1810 than he could have written the "Ode to Duty" in 1800. But to mark the limits of the generalization, let us acknowledge exceptions both outside the period and within it: "The Old Cumberland Beggar," a poem almost entirely concerned with duty (though of an unconscious sort), belongs to 1797; "The Solitary Reaper," a poem of imaginative release and reprieve, is written the year after the "Ode to Duty." Still, allowing for the broadness of the scheme: in the poems which fall into the first, and most simply imaginative, phase of his mature writing, Wordsworth places himself close to childhood states of feeling or inchoate thought; states that recurred, with him, into his early twenties. He shows himself, in these poems, to be a creature of wakeful sensibility, and of susceptibility to outward things--most alive to himself when the objects of his mind appear evanescent or in flight from him. This is a state of primitive exposure or pleasure in which the poet knows life through immersion in its particulars; the experience that is described, but more often named than described, is, in all respects, pre-moral. Perceptions are not brought into the field of judgment, nor is the mind of the human creature aware of a conscience that would judge. In a second phase, Wordsworth passes to a harder-to-characterize regime of thought, in which moments of vivid exposure and perception and conscious sensation are haunted by a fear of his own power as an active agent. He knows himself now as a creature not only of sensibility but of appetites, including a reckless hunger of appropriation. A necessary condition of his new awareness seems to be self-isolation: alone, Wordsworth feels most truly (though not quite happily) who he is; and in this state, he seeks out places of seclusion. (A premise of "Tintern Abbey is that he knows he is seeking such a place for such a reason: he passes from sheer sensation to thought and to "thoughts of more deep seclusion.") Self-doubt prompts him to look for a new control on his actions, and to some extent a control on his wayward thoughts. He finds this check most elementally in the continuous work of habitual associations. And here one approaches the heart of phase three: the world of habit. To Wordsworth, habit is a neutral term for the process that deepens the receptive grooves of feeling that may guide our actions, even as we obey principles of action that are partly self-imposed. "Habit" is his usual word, but, to clarify what Wordsworth has in mind, one may compare Burke's characterization of "just prejudice," which "previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved." I use the metaphor of grooves or tracks in order to capture something of the way habit can take hold of moral conduct. Wordsworth's own metaphors are apt to be more naturalizing, and even natural: he imagines himself nested in a place that knows and holds him; he is in the arms of those who know how to care for him, and who have taught him the meaning of self-care. …