Memory Studies

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Nostalgia, coming home, and the end of the poem: On reading William
Wordsworth's Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood
Ruth Abbott
Memory Studies 2010 3: 204
DOI: 10.1177/1750698010364812

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Article

Memory Studies
3(3) 204–214
Nostalgia, coming home, and © The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
the end of the poem: On reading co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1750698010364812
William Wordsworth’s Ode. http://mss.sagepub.com

Intimations of Immortality from

Recollections of Early Childhood

Ruth Abbott
University of Oxford, UK

Abstract
Reconsidering the functions of nostalgia during the reading of poems, this article argues that nostalgic longing
may be a more creative and critical force than we often think it. As both are understood in our century,
nostalgia can seem antithetical to critical reading. But time passes during reading, as well as between readings:
the very shape of reading, processing from beginning to inevitable end, means something is always being left
behind – something of which a poem’s marking of time through rhythm makes us particularly aware. Reading
one almost definitively nostalgic poem by an equally definitively nostalgic poet – William Wordsworth’s Ode.
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood – the article explores what happens between the
moment when a poem begins to speak and the moment it falls into silence. Focusing on some of the ways in
which time is experienced while a poem is read, it argues for nostalgia as integral rather than detrimental to
reading, with particular functions in relation to poetry worth our reconsideration.

Keywords
metre, nostos, prosody, reading, time, Wordsworth

There are many ways in which time can be wasted, the perusal of journals or the reading of poems
included. One of the most frustrating is probably in nostalgia for wasted time. Of course, time does
not always have to be wasted: we spend our lives well, perhaps; we learn something from journals,
surely. But nostalgia, associated with time as it has been over the last few decades, seems to have
become definitively wasteful. For as we so mortally know, time is irrecoverable, and the past that
we nostalgically, and therefore pointlessly long for is something we can neither get back, nor get
back to.
So can ‘nothing … bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower’? So
says that supposedly definitively nostalgic poet William Wordsworth in the 10th stanza of his
equally definitively nostalgic poem, once simply called Ode, but later revised with the better-known

Corresponding author:
Ruth Abbott, Worcester College, Walton Street, Oxford OX1 2HB, UK.
Email: ruth.abbott@worc.ox.ac.uk

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Abbott 205

subtitle ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’.1 The Ode’s sense of
lost time is from its outset plangently particular (lines 1–18):

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it has been of yore; –
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.

Wordsworth is certainly nostalgic. But he has also attracted some surprisingly nostalgic critics,
who lament the loss of an earlier more radical politics, or an earlier less compromised text, with as
much elegiac partiality as he ever showed for himself.2
This is surprising, because as both are understood in our century, nostalgia seems almost entirely
antithetical to criticism. While nostalgia looks back longingly to first times and early feelings, criti-
cism seeks to look beyond them to mature analysis; nostalgia walks hand in hand with childhood,
but now I am a critic, I have put childish ways of reading behind me. What Fred Hoerner calls
‘nostalgia’s freight’ in the Ode has consequently been condemned from multiple critical directions
(1995: 631). Guarding against the potential bias or fantasy that nostalgic reading could entail
is probably helpful. But it is significant that when Wordsworth enters criticism, criticism entertains
nostalgia, and I think Wordsworth himself should allow us to question our guardedness a little.
Wordsworth wrote not only his most moving, but also his most mature, thoughtful and critically
vital poetry out of the energy of this supposedly wasteful longing. Could the nostalgia of which
Wordsworth stands accused, whether his own nostalgia figured in the Ode’s descriptions, or
nostalgia we experience through reading the Ode itself, be a more creative and indeed more critical
force than we are prone to think it? Could nostalgia have a particular function in relation to poetry
worth our reconsideration? Can longing do something for reading?
It can certainly do something for our understanding of the word ‘nostalgia’ itself. For nostalgia,
as they say, isn’t what it used to be. Coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student,
the word was originally used as a medical term diagnosing soldiers with homesickness, and was
derived from the Greek roots nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning painful longing.
This sense of nostalgia, as a directed longing for a place rather than fruitless longing for the past,
predominated in the 18th and 19th centuries, and persisted well into the 20th century. Unlike time,
which began to haunt the word significantly enough during the 1920s and 1930s, this place could

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206 Memory Studies 3(3)

therefore be travelled to, could lie ahead as well as behind, in a longed-for future as well as a lost
past. Soldiers with nostalgia were often cured by being sent home.3
Written between 1802 and 1804 and published in 1807, the Ode too seems as nostalgic for an
area as it is for an era, an area to which even its opening implicitly gestures: ‘There was a time’.
Consider the manner in which the past-tense time placed so pointedly in these opening words is
looked for. From its listed location in the ‘meadow, grove, and stream’ of line 1, Wordsworth seems
to lament that he cannot find that time in particular places, ‘Turn wheresoe’er’ he may, ‘where’er’
he goes (lines 7, 17). The third stanza’s ‘Now’ may seem to recall him to the present’s joyful world
of time and sound (lines 19–57):

Now, while the Birds thus sing a joyous song,

And while the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.
The Cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep,
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay,
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday,
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd Boy!

Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call

Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath it’s coronal,
The fullness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While the Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are pulling,
On every side,
In a thousand vallies far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his mother’s arm:–
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there’s a Tree, of many one,
A single Field which I have look’d upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet

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Abbott 207

Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

But however precipitately enjambment, short lines and unusual syntax pull the poem on through
time; however ‘timely’ its sounds of birds singing, lambs bounding, cataracts trumpeting, moun-
tains echoing, shepherd boys shouting, creatures calling, and heavens laughing, Wordsworth’s
present tense insistence that ‘I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!’ nonetheless turns the spoken tales of
Tree, Field, and Pansy (lines 51–5) into asking ‘Whither’ the visionary gleam has fled in line 56,
and ‘Where’ the glory and the dream are now in line 57, not ‘when’.4
Time, it seems, is looked for as a place because it was felt as a place: home. Composed according
to Wordsworth after a two-year gap (1983[1807]: 428), the rest of the Ode elaborates as the fifth
stanza opens (lines 58–76):

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

The child’s soul comes from ‘afar’, from an ‘elsewhere’ described as ‘God, who is our home’, where
heaven ‘lies about us’ and ‘whence’ light flows. The passage of time as we age is thus literally a
passage, ‘daily farther from the East’, which the Youth ‘Must travel’.
And as the Swiss soldiers prescribed a nostos and the Greek armies returning after the Trojan
War who were their archetype knew, travel, unlike time, can run in two directions. So if the lost
glory that the soul left in the past is instead placed in line 166 as a ‘sea’, by line 168 we ‘Can in a
moment travel thither’ (lines 164–70):

Hence, in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,

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208 Memory Studies 3(3)

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Nonetheless, where exactly we travel to is a slightly different matter. For as Odysseus knew and
triumphed over, and as Agamemnon knew and died by, the home that your nostos brings you to will
have altered in the interim. As T.S. Eliot said of the England that he had made his home, we ‘arrive
where we started / And know the place for the first time’ (1970[1942]: 208). So Wordsworth’s
‘meadow, grove, and stream’, lost in the past tense of the first line, are re-addressed in the present
tense of the Ode’s last stanza. But here, after what line 189 calls the ‘years that bring the philosophic
mind’, they return altered, capitalized, and even cultivated, with streams replaced by fountains:
‘And oh ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, / Think not of any severing of our loves!’
(lines 190–1). The fifth stanza might intimate that the light of glory from which we come dims, not
into darkness, but into a common day that the human heart grows into seeing as light also: ‘At
length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day’ (lines 75–6). But this
is not the same celestial light that shone in Wordsworth’s past and in the Ode’s first stanza. That
light has faded, and the rhyming finality with which this is asserted in lines 178–9 cannot but
darken the insouciance that tries to lighten it: ‘What though the radiance which was once so bright /
Be now forever taken from my sight’.
Of course, light still fades into light. The ninth stanza gives thanks in lines 152–5 for the return
even of light’s:

shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing[.]

In the poem the possibility that it is not dust, but light we are, and to light we shall return, is thus
tentatively felt in what line 188 calls ‘the faith that looks through death’. Return of this kind is what
nostalgia longs for, and what the word’s original grounding in place makes feel possible. But time,
nonetheless, still falls in the interim. Wherever the ‘There’ that the time of light was is now, it
remains in the past tense. ‘There was a time’, and the emphasis, given by the line’s grounding in
that pattern of relatively weaker followed by relatively stronger emphasis on alternate syllables that
marks English iambic metre, will not let us forget it. What in the end can nostalgia do against
time’s ravages, against the time that can bring you home but turns your wife into either someone
else’s prize or your own murderer while you get there?
Frank Kermode describes literature as the human attempt to face just this question. Literary form,
the ‘shapes which console the dying generations’, is fashioned and is valued as an answer to human
longing in the face of the incomprehensible passing of time, what he calls our ‘need in the moment
of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end’ (1967: 3–4). According to this
account, we could say that however nostalgia is figured in an individual work, it can do something
for thinking because its longing begets literature, and literature in return offers consolation for
nostalgia’s grief. Backward-looking nostalgia for lost times gives birth to forward-looking writing
seeking to give shape to time itself: Wordsworth may be unable himself to return to the past that he
feels is his home, but he can write a poem that can, and however much he may revise, rewrite or re-
title it over successive years, in the time of the Ode, past and present can be united in a single shape.

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Abbott 209

But the time of the Ode itself deserves as much consideration here as does the time that
Wordsworth feels he is losing or the time that might have passed in writing about its loss. Poems
are single shapes in certain senses: a poem can be comprehended as a visual shape, for example, in
something close to an instantaneous moment (although even with a poem as relatively short as the
206-line Ode this quickly becomes difficult, particularly if successive versions are taken into
account). But this is only one sense, one way and probably not the most interesting of knowing a
poem, and when Kermode calls books ‘fictive models of the temporal world’ (1967: 54) we have
to demur, or glance at our watches. Highly persuasive as it is, his emphasis on books as shapes that
only model temporality has to be limited. Because books are also in the temporal world. Not only
an attempt to impose a unified, beginning–middle–end shape on the incomprehensible passing of
time, literature also partakes in the incomprehensible passing of time, and time passes as we read
poems as inexorably as it does any other hour of the day.
Can reading then be subject to nostalgia as well as its possible solution? At any given moment
in an encounter with a poem, that poem has a past and future on the page or in the memory. As we
read, we are always leaving phrases, words and rhythms behind us, in the past, albeit a recent past
to which we can easily return. Literature cannot only be a solution to nostalgia, because it is as
deeply subject to time’s passings as anything under the sun, or clock-face, depending on your
century. Poems are so particularly, perhaps, because the paralinguistic play of emphasis and
cadence and duration that we call prosody means that time in poems is marked not just through a
succession of words but also through a succession of stresses and emphases. Poems are thus what
the Ode’s line 23 calls ‘timely utterance’ themselves.
In an era in which, as David Perkins has demonstrated (1991), vocal encounters with verse
were universally presupposed and practised, this timeliness would have been felt particularly
emphatically. G.W.F. Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics of the 1820s spoke for their period in reason-
ing that since ‘speaking does not exist, like a work of visual art, on its own account apart from
the artist, it is the living man himself, the individual speaker, who alone is the support for the
perceptible presence and actuality of a poetic production’ (1975: Vol. 2, 1036). Wordsworth, in
an essay of 1815, was equally adamant: as ‘Poems, however humble in their kind, if they be good
in that kind, cannot read themselves’, his own ‘require … an animated or impassioned recitation’
(1974: Vol. 3, 29). A letter to John Thelwall of January 1804 even claimed that it was ‘Physically
impossible’ not to give verse’s line-endings ‘an intonation of one kind or an other’ prompted by
what Wordsworth calls ‘the passion of metre’ (1967: 434). Whether this intonation is fully voiced
or internally imagined, time in poems is for Wordsworth therefore marked by, as well as felt in,
our bodies, and is thus emphatically known to be real, and to be passing. As Simon Jarvis has
said, the insistent timeliness of prosodic emphasis ‘cannot but claim that our experience of duration
is real’ (1998: 6).
It is, then, surely important that time and emphasis in the Ode pass prosodically curiously.
Although the bare experience of prosodic emphasis might emphasize the reality of time’s passing
in a general sense, within the Ode’s particular metrical patterns prosodic certainty consistently falls
away from its reader. Time, after all, is often felt by the Ode’s author to be not just passing but slip-
ping out of the grasp, is felt as what the ninth stanza calls ‘Fallings from us, vanishings’ (line 146).
And the Ode’s prosodic time is similarly subject to curious metrical fallings, as its words seem to
fall away from both its iambic metrical pattern and its equally curious play of rhyme and line
length. When the third stanza tries to cheer itself up by describing the happy landscape of the pres-
ent, for example, we almost feel the inevitable failure of that attempt in the awkward polysyllabic
cadences of the rhymes (lines 30–3):

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210 Memory Studies 3(3)

Land and sea

Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday[.]

The time is out of joint, and falls away from the speaker who tries to grasp it: a relatively strongly
stressed monosyllable such as ‘sea’ cannot quite keep time with, or rhyme with, a polysyllable that
falls away in two relatively weakly stressed syllables such as ‘jollity’. The same might be said of
the 10th stanza’s attempt to find comfort (lines 182–9):

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind,
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be,
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering,
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

In the near-failure of the rhymed words, pairing the falling cadences of the polysyllabic ‘sympathy’
and ‘suffering’ with the emphatic monosyllables ‘be’ and ‘spring’, is heard the possibility that time
might not be able to make anything spring out of suffering, let alone soothing thoughts.
Eighteenth-century prosodic handbooks almost uniformly remarked on the impossibility of
reconciling the majority of polysyllables, particularly those ending with two or more relatively
weakly stressed syllables, with the regularly alternating stress pattern of iambic metre. Edward
Bysshe’s The Art of Poetry counsels poets in the edition owned by Wordsworth to ‘avoid the fre-
quent Use of Words of many Syllables, which … come not into Verse without a certain Violence
altogether disagreeable; particularly those whose Accents are on the Fourth Syllables from the
last, as Undutifulness’ (1710: 11). Lord Kames laments that English verse ‘excludes the bulk of
polysyllables, which are the most sounding words in our language; for very few of them have such
alternation of long and short syllables as to correspond to either of the arrangements mentioned’
(Home, 1785: Vol. 2, 122). Because of the lack of ‘alternation’ that Kames notices, such words
characteristically fall away from English metrical patterns.
Yet Wordsworth loves this cadence, these polysyllabic words that fall away in two or more rela-
tively weaker syllables, and its dying fall is felt throughout his blank verse as well as throughout
the Ode. Hallam Tennyson recorded a contest in 1835 between his father and Fitzgerald over ‘who
could invent the weakest Wordsworthian line imaginable’: the winning line, variously claimed by
both contestants, was ‘A Mr Wilkinson, a clergyman’, a line comprising two such polysyllabic
fallings (1897: 153). Nearly one fifth of the Ode’s lines contain such a polysyllable. Time, which
the Ode’s voice sometimes tries to triumph over, is thus felt as it passes in prosody to be as full of
misgivings as childhood is in the ninth stanza, full of (lines 144–50):

those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature

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Abbott 211

Moving about in worlds not realiz’d,

High instincts, before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surpriz’d[.]

‘Vanishings’: words vanish from the voice as the past vanishes from the human heart that must learn
to live without it. In the last three stanzas’ 74 lines alone fall the polysyllables ‘fugitive’, ‘liberty’,
‘obstinate’, ‘questionings’, ‘vanishings’, ‘listlessness’, ‘enmity’, ‘utterly’, ‘sympathy’, ‘suffering’,
and finally, in the last stanza, that beautiful pair, ‘mortality’ and ‘tenderness’. Cadence is a tender
way to feel the losses of time, a tender way to hear the reality of the duration of existence: that
reality being, of course, an existence that will not endure, that will itself fall away, not in immortality
at all, but in death.
This means that emphasis in the Ode doesn’t just make us feel the existence of time in our bodies
as we read, it also makes us feel the loss of time. Metrical patterns are set up by the return of certain
sounds and rhythms: we do not know that a particular word or sound is part of a pattern until that
word or sound has been first left in the poem’s past as we read and then allowed to return. Our
sense of metre, like our sense of ourselves, is thus reliant on a sense of the past. It is our sense of
that past – of the near past of a poem’s previous sounds and rhythms, and the more distant past of
all the sounds and rhythms that have historically preceded it – that makes the apprehension of a
poem’s patterns possible, and allows that ‘perception of similitude in dissimilitude’ upon which
Wordsworth believed much of ‘the pleasure received from metrical language’ depended (1974:
Vol. 1, 149). There is a kind of nostalgia that is therefore integral to the very reading of verse: the
recognition of its patterns is reliant upon both careful backward-looking attention to the rhythmic
past of the poem we are in the middle of reading, and expectation or even longing for that rhythmic
past to return as reading continues.
In the Ode, therefore, where the past times, rhymes and patterns of its rhythmic past return so
strikingly fleetingly, reading is characterized by loss. Our nostalgic expectation of the metrical
return of particular patterns always comes up against the fallings from us and vanishings that those
patterns perform. Reading the Ode’s unpredictable and ever-shifting line-lengths and rhyme-
schemes, far from giving what Wordsworth in a characteristically temporal phrase called ‘continual
and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical arrangement’ (1974: Vol. 1, 147),
can thus feel something like a series of disappointments. Only a quarter of the Ode’s rhymes, which
return across hugely varying line lengths and distances through its irregular stanzas, pair regular
adjacent lines of the same length. Take the third stanza, quoted above: its first line (line 19) doesn’t
find its rhyming pair until five lines later (line 24), and even its closing pair shifts in length to
rhyme the four-word line 34 to the 12-word line 35:

Thou Child of Joy,

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd Boy!

Even the fleeting arrivals of what seem like regular rhyming ballad stanzas, at the beginning of the
ninth or end of the tenth stanzas for example, are consistently troubled by the falling cadences of
the polysyllabic words that pepper them, and do not live long in any case, interrupted as they
always are by shifts in indentation and line length or failures of rhyme, of which the break into the
‘years that bring the philosophic mind’ of line 189 is only the most striking example.
It is thus only as the Ode ends, as in its final four lines its rhymes settle into a closing chorale of
alternating pairs, that its patterns can be fully apprehended (lines 203–6):

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212 Memory Studies 3(3)

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

For although our experience of metre is backward-looking in its reliance on patterns that we have
heard in the poem’s past, it comes to completion only at the end of the poem, the point at which
all past patterns, however irregular, can finally be recognized in their interconnectedness. Just as
nostalgia in its historical sense is directed, not towards a time left in the past, but towards a home
to be returned to in the future, the home that the expectation of reading looks for lies finally in the
poem’s end not in its beginning.
A rather beautiful etymological connection corroborates this. Nostos, the Greek word for home-
coming from which nostalgia is drawn, is also a term in Greek poetics. It means the end of the
poem.5 This is not arbitrary: nostos, used to refer to the return of the Greeks after the Trojan war,
came by extension to refer to the ends of the two epic cycles where this homecoming was accom-
plished: the Odyssey, and the lost Nostoi, which narrated the return of all but the wandering
Odysseus. The idea of homecoming became so fully identified with the ends not only of these but
of all poems that nostos became a more general term, and the end of the poem itself began to be
conceived as a homecoming in its own right. In its original sense, reading with nostalgia thus
technically means reading with a painful longing to reach the end of the poem.
I’m sure we’ve all read long poems we’ve painfully longed to reach the end of, poems by
Wordsworth particularly perhaps! But more seriously, by nostalgically recovering this poetic sense
of nostos, might we not also be able to recover the critical energies that nostalgia seems to have
lost? The longings of nostalgia could be integral not just to metrical attention but to critical reading
in general, insofar as all reading is driven by a longing to understand the lines and words that lie in
the poem’s past, by reaching a kind of critical homecoming that can only know the poem wholly,
can only understand its beginnings, at its end. Reading with nostalgia could actually propel reading,
through careful backward-looking attention to the parts of the poem being left in the past, towards
the end of the poem where that past can be fully understood.
But what of the implications of calling the end of the poem a nostos, or homecoming? What is
the home to which it returns? We do not necessarily return to where the poem started, and the ends
of poems are not often very like their beginnings at all. What after all do line 1’s ‘There was a time
when meadow, grove, and stream’ and line 206’s far-from-final ‘Thoughts that do often lie too
deep for tears’ have to do with each other? Really, the end of the poem is surely the opposite of
return: if the poem is marked by a certain way of knowing time through metre and its emphases,
the end of the poem marks an absolute disjunction from that time. Giorgio Agamben, technically
defining verse by the possibility of enjambment, or opposition between metrical limits at line-
endings and syntactic limits of punctuation and grammar, has even claimed that the end of the
poem, where enjambment is definitively impossible, falls into prose: ‘For’, he claims, ‘if poetry is
defined precisely by the possibility of enjambment, it follows that the last verse of a poem is not
a verse’ (1999: 112).
His logic misses, however, what the continuation of that logic must imply. The end of the poem
is not the only point where enjambment is not possible. The beginning of the poem is similarly
defined by the lack of enjambment that precedes it: there can be no more tension between metrical
and syntactic limits as the first words speak than there can as the last words fall into silence. The
end of the poem is thus a kind of return to the lack of tension between metrical and syntactic limits

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Abbott 213

that according to Agamben’s logic must define the poem’s beginning as well as its end. And setting
this definition aside, it is at least certain that if a poem is a place where time and its passings are
known particularly emphatically through the insistence of metre, its beginning and end mark the
limits to that metre, and to that way of knowing time. The Ode’s return for most of its closing
stanza to the iambic 10-syllable line with which it opens might be heard as a kind of homecoming to
that particular prosodic pattern. But the end of the Ode itself is a still more emphatic homecoming
to those other, less emphatically prosodic ways of knowing time that mark the long stretches of our
lives not taken up in the reading of poetry.
In our lives, without the emphatic passing of time that metrical patterns press upon us, we
perhaps feel time less pressingly than we either could or should. We are mostly unaware of it, but
the meaning of all English words is as dependent on stress patterns as the meaning of all English
poems. Consider the famous semantic difference that emphasis makes between a black bird and a
blackbird, for example, and that fact that all prose has its own prosody becomes apparent. Perhaps,
then, if reading poems and recognizing their patterns relies on a constant and vigilant nostalgia for
the rhythms we leave in the poem’s past as we read, we can return at the end of the poem more
aware of the rhythms of time itself. The cessation of the Ode’s falling and faltering patterns returns
us to our own time. But its time, in which the reality of the lapses and losses as well as the lengths
of time has been felt, is unforgettable. Nostalgia in reading the Ode makes us aware of its times and
patterns. But it also makes us aware of the faltering of time itself, which those times and patterns
make real for us. What can longing do for thinking? At the end of the poem, we arrive in the when
where we started, and know the time for the first time.

Notes
1 All references are to Curtis’s reading text, which gives the first published version from 1807 (Wordsworth,
1983[1807]: 269–77). A free online text of this version can be found at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/
poem/2352.html.
2 The essays on Wordsworth in Brinkley and Hanley (1992: 18–135) engage variously with the 20th-century
prevalence in Wordsworth studies of what can be called textual nostalgia, and the biographical or political
nostalgia it commonly entails.
3 See ‘nostalgia, n. 1.’ in comparison to ‘2.’ (OED, 2008).
4 I have always felt that this turn to ‘a Tree, of many one’, which ‘speak[s] of something that is gone’
recalls ‘the one blasted tree’ of The Prelude’s Book XI, which Wordsworth recounts waiting by as a boy
for horses to carry him home, and which becomes indelibly associated with the death of his father that
swiftly follows this homecoming (1979: 436–7). The ‘something that is gone’ of which the Ode’s one tree
speaks thus seems curiously bound, through this linguistic recall, to this loss.
5 See ‘nostos, n.’ (OED, 2008).

References
Agamben, Giorgio (1999) The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Brinkley, Robert and Keith Hanley (eds) (1992) Romantic Revisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bysshe, Edward (1710) The Art of Poetry, 4th edn. London.
Eliot, T.S. (1970[1942]) ‘Little Gidding’, in Collected Poems 1909–1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1975) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hoerner, Fred (1995) ‘Nostalgia’s Freight in Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode’, ELH 62(3): 631–61.
Home, Henry (Lord Kames) (1785) Elements of Criticism. 2 vols. London.
Jarvis, Simon (1998) ‘Prosody as Cognition’, Critical Quarterly 40(4): 3–15.

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214 Memory Studies 3(3)

Kermode, Frank (1967) The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Perkins, David (1991) ‘How the Romantics Recited Poetry’, Studies in English Literature 31: 655–71.
Tennyson, Hallam (1897) Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son. London: Macmillan.
Wordsworth, William (1967) The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805,
ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wordsworth, William (1974) The Prose Works, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wordsworth, William (1979) The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. M.H. Abrams, Stephen Gill and Jonathan
Wordsworth. London: Norton.
Wordsworth, William (1983[1807]) ‘Ode’, in Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed.
Jared Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
OED (2008) ‘nostalgia, n. 1.’ and ‘nostos, n.’, OED Online. Available at: http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/
entry/00327373/

Author Biography
Ruth Abbott is Lecturer in English 1642–1832 and Research Fellow of Worcester College at the
University of Oxford. She joined Worcester in October 2009 from a visiting fellowship at Cornell
University (USA), having pursued doctoral work on William Wordsworth’s philosophic blank verse
with Professor Simon Jarvis in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge. She regularly
publishes articles and reviews on the literature of the long 18th century and contemporary poetry.

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