Drunk with the Beauty of This World

The book rests on the chair, a family keepsake bound in gilt tooled green cloth – Our English Lakes, Mountains, and Waterfalls, as Seen by William Wordsworth. Photographically Illustrated, published by A. W. Bennett in 1864 with contents arranged by location: Winandermere [sic], Esthwaite, Langdale, The Rotha, Rydale, Grasmere, Helvellyn, Derwent-water and Ulleswater, Brougham Castle, Black Comb (Figure 1). From its pages fall cuttings from English newspapers of the early 1900s, along with slips of paper containing handwritten quotations from poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Moore, and Henry Ward Beecher – copperplate memorials to the ‘wealth and happiness of our kind’, tales of despair relieved by faith, of steadfastness in the face of death.

Figure 1 Our English Lakes, Mountains, and Waterfalls, as Seen by William Wordsworth. Photographically Illustrated (London 1864). Cuttings and title page.

Source: Author Photograph

Among the newspaper cuttings headlines swim into view: ‘Unconscious Worry: Why One’s Sleep Is Disturbed and Troubled’; ‘Come on Shropshires’; ‘Hell amid Flowers’. And the year: 1917, which is visible on a folded corner to the left of the title of ‘The Haunted Garden’, a descriptive prose piece by Edith Nesbit, author of The Railway Children (1906), clipped neatly from The Daily Mail:

For those who live on, summer has become unbearable, prompting thoughts of those men, lost in the war, who cannot share its ‘insolent triumph’:

Beside this clipping, a pressed lime tree leaf, a small card, and a sealed envelope, on which are mounted pressed flowers. The inscriptions: ‘From Ervillers France June 1917’; ‘Picked in Hennecourt Wood France on the March Retreat 1918 = A. H. S.=’. In his concluding paragraph, the writer of the newspaper article ‘Hell amid Flowers’ (dated 25 May 1917) imagines the men of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry surrounded by fields of gold, ‘drunk with the beauty of this world of life, so that a field all silvered with daisies means more to them than all the war, as I have heard them say’. And now, long since detached from the corncockles, pinks, and the solitary cornflower gathered in France, the remains of a common daisy slip through my fingers.

I stare at these mementos, fallings and vanishings from a beloved volume, and allow my imagination to pursue paths of association while reason prompts me to observe at a distance, to resist the temptation to fall into an affective tone that might dishonour the volume’s stark facticity. A bookplate or signature would help; as it is, the absence of these signs adds to the sense of an inaccessible, private reality, which withdraws from my effort to grasp it. For even if that reality could be accounted for – one can imagine a quantum computer able, in some distant future, to gather all these little bundles of reality together, starting with the book’s provenance, its family history, the connection with A. H. S., the link with the Shropshires – still we would find ourselves overwhelmed by a flood of accidental or sensual qualities: instances of grieving, pathos, and nostalgia that swirl within, around, and far beyond the book’s real qualities – fragments of a reality beyond calculation.¹

***

Religion is spilt in the most unusual places, and at this point the book I am writing is unsure of itself. But the sense of that excess of feeling, of lives that even after death haunt the imagination, cannot be ignored. Thus, despite myself, I am drawn to the book’s connection with ‘old, unhappy, far-off things,/And battles long ago’, elements of an affective power irreducible to quanta that speak, diffidently yet compellingly, of the afterlife of war.² How that afterlife should be conceived will be explored in the discussion that follows, but I am prepared to accept that no single position will account for the life that emerges in Wordsworth, so strangely and with such force, in the aftermath of Britain’s victory in the war against France. At the announcement of peace, prematurely declared in 1814 and then confirmed in 1815, Wordsworth’s poetry undergoes a change – these, after all, are the years in which The Excursion is published and the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ is conceived, works that for many readers mark the end of the poet’s ‘great period’ and the beginning of the long, slow descent into creative sclerosis. But setting aside, for now, the question of artistic accomplishment, the claim that the end of war marks a watershed in Wordsworth’s poetic development should be qualified by the acknowledgement that many of the currents emerging in this period can be dated back to earlier phases in his career. Moreover, three of the most important poems that Wordsworth published between 1815 and 1822, the post-war years with which this book is largely concerned, were composed in the late 1790s and early 1800s: Peter Bell, The Waggoner, and The White Doe of Rylstone. To adapt a statement made at the beginning of The Holiday (1949), Stevie Smith’s brittle and unsettling account of life after the Second World War, in the late 1810s, just as ‘it cannot be said that it is war, it cannot be said that it is peace, it can be said that it is post-war’ so for much of Wordsworth’s poetry it cannot be said that it is late, it cannot be said that it is early, it can be said that it is post-dated – its meaning determined by a future with which it has yet to coincide.³

A mood of anxious imprecision – is this peace? is this war? – sits very well with the blurring of distinctions between Fancy and Imagination, early and late, that can be detected in the poems Wordsworth wrote and published between Waterloo and Peterloo, not least when the poet seeks to create an impression of his work as a ‘legitimate whole’, as the system of classification, introduced in the 1815 Poems so that ‘the work may more obviously correspond with the course of human life’, had attempted to accomplish (Prose III. 24). For the remainder of his career, Wordsworth stubbornly adhered to this system, preferring the artificial and, as it frequently turned out, labile arrangement of the poems by ‘subject […] mould or form’ over the chronological ‘history of the poet’s mind’ favoured by Charles Lamb and Henry Crabb Robinson.⁴ Yet, as the system advanced into a shifting mosaic of forms, thoughts, and feelings, it enabled readers to forge connections between poems that a more conventional ‘history’ might have precluded. A particularly resonant example is the surprising yet, as I go on to argue in Chapter 5, wholly appropriate sequential arrangement of the Immortality and Thanksgiving odes in the 1820 three- and four-volume collected Poems. More so, I think, than present-day readers, Wordsworth’s contemporary audience understood the porosity of these great expressions of peace and war, of how delicate affirmations of recovery could bleed into plangent avowals of national triumph.

The belief, however, that Wordsworth fades into irrelevance after Waterloo maintains a firm hold on our understanding of the poet’s history, and in large measure this is due to how our sense of the work that Wordsworth produced in the aftermath of war has been shaped by the reactions of a culturally significant yet statistically unrepresentative group of contemporary readers. The 1816 ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ is usually recalled, if at all, as the poem that set the seal on Wordsworth’s reputation among the second-generation poets, providing confirmation that the poet of The Excursion (1814) was indubitably of and for the establishment. Following its damning reception, Wordsworth, while maintaining an active interest in domestic politics, engaged very little with matters of international import, preferring instead to issue quietly authoritative pronouncements on the nature of the good life from the perspective of a Cincinnatian recluse. An account of this period in the poet’s development might well conclude, on the basis of the complex sequence of reactions and counter-reactions that determined the publication of Peter Bell and The Waggoner (1819), followed by the wilful embrace of parochialism, dullness, and whimsy that appears to inform the River Duddon volume (1820), the Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822), and the Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820 (1822), that Wordsworth at the end of war, having forgone the loftier claims of Imagination in favour of the ‘embrace’ of History’s ‘closing deed magnificent’, has nothing more to say.⁵

The reasonableness of this conclusion is apparent from the dejected assessment of one of Wordsworth’s staunchest allies. Writing to Dorothy Wordsworth in 1826 Crabb Robinson complained that the poet who had written ‘heroically and divinely against the tyranny of Napoleon’ was ‘quite indifferent to all the successive tyrannies which disgraced the succeeding times’.⁶ Adopting the voice of ‘some future commentator’ he announces, with damning sardonicism: ‘“This great poet survived to the fifth decennary of the Nineteenth Century, but he appears to have died in the year 1814, as far as life consisted in an active sympathy with the temporary welfare of his fellow creatures”.’ Robinson’s judgement is directed against Wordsworth’s seeming indifference to the recent Bourbon interventions in Spain, which attempted to restore King Ferdinand VII to the absolute power of which he had been deprived during the Liberal Triennium, but it addresses broader, far-reaching concerns, akin to Coleridge’s frequently voiced criticisms about the poet’s failure to write the grand ‘philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society’,⁷ about the worth of Wordsworth’s work in the modern age.

Responding to Robinson in the pointedly titled sonnet ‘Retirement’, Wordsworth defends himself from the Thomist accusation of recusatio tensionis by announcing to his ‘patriot Friend’ (l. 3) that ‘Peace in these feverish times is sovereign bliss’ (l. 9), a line that manages simultaneously to function as a defence of royal prerogative while linking the transcendence of worldly agitation to the ecstasy of self-governance.⁸ But the sense of joyful release afforded by the refusal of the vita activa in favour of the vita contemplativa is more aptly conveyed in ‘Not Love, nor War, nor the tumultuous swell’.⁹ Composed in 1821, the sonnet’s opening quatrain, with its gathering of six negative comparators, emulates Shakespeare’s sonnet 65 in seeking to weigh the charms of ephemeral beauty against the pains of ‘civil conflict’ and ‘the wrecks of change’ (l. 2). But while Shakespeare converts dissension and conjecture into a confident closed couplet declaration of artistic endurance (‘O none, unless this miracle have might,/That in black ink my love may still shine bright’, ll. 13–14),¹⁰ Wordsworth, drawing on the fluid resources of the Petrarchan form, counters negativity though a technique of patient insistence, effacing the not/nor constraints of the conflicted world by linking together images of ‘sage content’ and ‘placid melancholy’ (l. 10), by instilling a sense of protracted ease through the use of hendecasyllables and a closing alexandrine, through the repetitive insistence of the verb to be, and the lulling effect of the correspondent double rhymes. Thus, the muse watches ‘the blue smoke of the elmy grange,/Skyward ascending from the twilight dell’ (ll. 6–7):

Such poetry might easily be dismissed as a mode of reactionary escapism – Peterloo, after all, had only recently raised the spectre of a return to civil conflict – but the verse is informed by memories of an earlier phase in Wordsworth’s development, the period in which, as a young radical, the poet envisaged the triumph of the meek. In this new world of peaceable delight, shared alike by all forms of life, discord through love and war is accepted as the origin of history but is effectively cordoned off from the ensuing state of beatific languor. In the absence of a governing ‘I’, the sonnet surveys the changing nature of things with unselfconscious equanimity, released from the violent ardour of self-definition.

‘Not Love, nor War’ is a poem of the Fancy, and in the pages that follow I examine more closely how this aesthetic category, along with its counterpart Imagination, came to be associated in Wordsworth’s poetry with the dialectical relation between peace and war, a notion that raises the spectre of Hegel’s account of the violent underpinnings of individuation in the Philosophy of Right (1821). If, as the sonnet implies, peace consists in self-abnegation, allowing the self to melt into a fanciful dream of unity with the world, then war, as Hegel maintains, can be seen as a form of self-definition, for it is only through the disruption of passivity that individuals may attain self-consciousness, insofar as war confronts the individual with the finitude of his existence.¹¹ In this, Hegel follows in a tradition of radical enlightenment thought that, even as it seeks to institute peaceful co-existence in the struggle for individuation, ends up granting, and at times even applauding, the necessity of war.¹² In ‘The State of War’ (c. 1750s), Rousseau, for instance, condemns the effects of state-sanctioned violence (‘I see fire and flames, countrysides deserted, and towns sacked […] I see a scene of murders, ten thousand men slaughtered, the dead piled up in heaps, the dying trampled underfoot by horses, everywhere the image of death and agony’) only to admit that conflict is ‘the fruit’ of those ‘peaceful institutions’ on which society is founded.¹³ The state of nature in which man dwells in peace turns out to be illusory, since to live this way, all men must agree to do so. In other words, the state of nature demands a social contract, which entails the creation of institutions to regulate the relations between ‘land, money [and] men’ – ‘all the spoils that can be appropriated thus become the principal object of mutual hostilities’.¹⁴

In related manner, Kant, in the Critique of Judgement (1789), suggests that war enhances the vitality of civil society, going so far as to declare that ‘war has something sublime about it’.¹⁵ War for Kant is sublime because the struggle of a people in the face of danger mimics the way in which reason stands its ground in the encounter with excessive magnitude and power. Elsewhere, Kant avers that war may act as ‘an incentive’ for the growth of ‘culture’. ‘Though war’, he argues, ‘is an intentional human endeavour (incited by our unbridled passions), yet it is also a deeply hidden and perhaps intentional endeavour of the supreme wisdom, if not to establish, then at least to prepare the way for lawfulness.’¹⁶ Since ‘a prolonged peace […] tends to make prevalent a mere commercial spirit, and along with it base selfishness, cowardice, and softness, and to debase the thinking of that people’, periodic outbreaks of hostilities with rival nation states are not only historically inevitable but also desirable if a nation is to maintain its integrity.¹⁷ A few years later, however, at a time when Europe had suffered the destabilising impact of France’s revolutionary struggle, Kant, in what appears to be a swerve from the militant fatalism of the third Critique, turns his attention to ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795). But Kant’s title, as the opening paragraph declares, is taken from a Dutch inn keeper’s sign on which a graveyard is painted.¹⁸ Here, as Peter Melville points out, Kant is attuned to the ironies of perpetual peace, aware of how, as an ‘intolerant universal law’, perpetual peace must strive to eliminate not only all existing but all possible forms of opposition, including ‘its own opposition to opposition as such’.¹⁹ However, the self-defeating logic of perpetual peace conceals a deeper truth: that peace must open itself to its own constitutive violence. By remaining hospitable to opposition, perpetual peace may be refigured as an ‘“impure” regulatory ideal’: a promise that aspires towards (but cannot attain) a state of harmony that, in the Derridean sense, is always to come.²⁰

In the letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, written in the spring of 1793, Wordsworth advances remarkably similar arguments for the impossibility of peace, declaring that ‘Liberty’ ‘in order to reign in peace must establish herself by violence’ (Prose I. 33). A year later he had reversed his opinion, announcing: ‘I recoil from the bare idea of a revolution […] I am a determined enemy to every species of violence […] I deplore the miserable situation of the French’ (EY 124). Abandoning the instrumentalist framework that, in the Llandaff letter, provided justification for revolutionary violence, Wordsworth nevertheless identifies as an ‘enemy’ of violence, thereby replicating the cycle in which pacific ends founded on relations of antagonism perpetuate violence. He goes on to advance similar arguments for the maintenance of enmity as a mode of individual and collective self-preservation, a position that would place him at odds with radical critics of Kant, such as Thomas Beddoes, who despaired of the German philosopher’s pessimistic account of the ability of political institutions to furnish lasting peace, as well as later positive peace campaigners, such as William Cobbett, William Roscoe, and Leigh Hunt.²¹ Yet, despite the drift towards acceptance of the necessity of war, there remains in Wordsworth’s writing a lingering attachment to the dream of irenic fulfilment, typically manifested in poems like ‘Not Love, nor War’ that, in their Ovidian voluptuousness, query Virgilian ideas of duty, discipline, and self-restraint, the politico-affective qualities most associated with the later poems.

That Wordsworth’s later verse does not always conform to our presuppositions concerning the distinctions between sensual and austere, playful and authoritarian, tranquil and combative is deepened further when we attempt to frame this poetry in terms of its relations with contemporary political philosophy.²² In the search for conceptual affinities in Wordsworth’s writings scholars have long been in the habit of negotiating a tricky path between radical and conservative thinkers, finding, for example, in the 1793 Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff Rousseaustic influences and clear affinities with Burke in The Prelude. Note has also been made of Coleridge’s influence on Wordsworth’s political development, which in the 1790s had embraced revolutionary pacifist and pacificist thought before transitioning in the 1800s to pro-war conservatism.²³ In designating the point at which Wordsworth moves from radical enlightenment poet to reactionary Tory bard, critics inspired by one or more of these readings isolate The Excursion as the poem in which the poet finally abjures his earlier Jacobin self, in the guise of the Solitary, to embrace the role of a loyal supporter of the conservative establishment.²⁴ Unsurprisingly, it is in The Excursion that Wordsworth presents his most sustained poetic critique of revolutionary pacifism; yet, as I go on to argue in Chapter 1, it is in this poem and more vividly in ‘The Recluse’ fragments that precede it that Wordsworth delivers some of his most persuasive and touching descriptions of how peace might appear in a post-war world. Not insignificantly, many of these descriptions, such as the radically panpsychist account of the ‘active principle alive in all things’ that initiates Book IX of The Excursion, have their origins in a much earlier phase of Wordsworth’s poetic development, suggesting again how stark chronological distinctions obscure how poems have ‘properties which spread/Beyond themselves, a power by which they make/Some other being’, perhaps a later poet or a later reader, ‘conscious of their life’.²⁵ Later, most concertedly in The White Doe and The Waggoner, sporadically in the River Duddon poems and Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820, and even, at times, in the Thanksgiving volume and Ecclesiastical Sketches, we find renewed stirrings of this early, radical desire for peaceable existence, a desire not wholly expunged by the poet’s shift towards reactionary bellicosity.

Wordsworth After War is, then, not a book about Wordsworth’s later poetry; nor, for that matter, is it a book that argues concertedly for a singular view of the late Wordsworth as a poet of war or as a poet of the peace. Barring his friendship with the Quaker Thomas Clarkson, a founding member of the Society for the Promotion of Universal and Perpetual Peace, there is no evidence to suggest that Wordsworth held any sympathy with views that, even after Waterloo, continued to be associated with revolutionary politics.²⁶ By the same token, setting aside his correspondence with the military theorist Sir Charles William Pasley, it would be reductive to portray late Wordsworth as an ardent supporter of the ‘War-faction’.²⁷ Rather, as will become clear, my concern is with the persistence in the poetry of attitudes, orientations, and affective states that, from their emergence earlier in his career, marked Wordsworth out as a poet driven towards the complication of what can be expected of life and art in the aftermath of war. Instead of seeing the termination of the war with France as an opportunity to hymn the triumph of legitimacy over tyranny, we see in Wordsworth’s poetry a fascination with the failure or incompletion of the revolutionary experiment, a fascination that homes in on thoughts and feelings that cannot be accommodated within the cultural framework of the post-war settlement. In this sense, the poetry Wordsworth writes after war is haunted by revolutionary ‘traces’, to adopt a word used by Hazlitt to affirm a form of radical nostalgia in his review of The Excursion.²⁸ As I go on to explore, it is precisely as a result of its ghostliness, its recollection of older, revolutionary impulses, of those aspirations to a better life, free from sanguinary competition, as well as the atavistic promptings of warlike counter-currents, that this poetry, so often dismissed as slight, anti-climactic, socially conservative, and artistically constrained, speaks so volubly to the present age, an age that shares with the post-war culture of Regency England a combustible mood of impatience and anxiety, disillusionment and despair.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

In concert with those supplementary paper figures, tied to yet detached from Our English Lakes, Mountains, and Waterfalls, sibylline predictions of weal and woe drift through Wordsworth’s post-war poetry, driven by gusts that create momentary attachments, complicating affinities that might, in less accomplished hands, appear close-minded, anti-climactic, or straightforwardly banal. Work will need to be done to capture the precise forms of strangeness that inhabit this poetry,²⁹ but we might already see, in the unfinished, contested, and infinitely suggestive form of this mid-Victorian keepsake, an indication of how this work should proceed. Although the focus of this book is on work published in the wake of the defeat of imperial France, from the outset of his career Wordsworth was, in a sense, always writing after war – looking ahead, that is, to a possible future when war would be either relinquished or retained as a lamentable but necessary element in the march and progress of human history. Before proceeding to address how these possible futures emerge in Wordsworth’s writing and at how this book will develop, I want to look at a set of poems that bear directly on the material evocation of peace with which this discussion began.

Pages 158–68 of Our English Lakes, Mountains, and Waterfalls, at the head of a selection of Wordsworth’s ‘Poems on Flowers’: ‘To the Daisy’ (‘In youth from rock to rock I went’), ‘To the Same Flower’ (‘Bright Flower!’). Composed shortly after the announcement of the Treaty of Amiens (25 March 1802–18 May 1803), the brief cessation of Britain’s conflict with France seems to have provided Wordsworth too with a breathing space, an interval in which ‘the mind should be permitted to recover from its perturbation or astonishment’.³⁰ If, as Jerome Christensen has argued, the peace offered respite, not only from the socio-economic and moral shocks of war but also from the daily bombardment of cultural astonishment, then we can perhaps begin to see how Wordsworth should find in ‘To the Daisy’ a means to suspend those ‘stately passions’ that ‘in me burn’ (l. 49).³¹ Relief from war provides the poet with an opportunity to observe and, as it were, become absorbed by an object of ‘less ambitious aim’ (l. 29) than those totems of epic insistence – the noble warrior, the besieged castle, the grand clash of arms – that wartime culture demanded.

‘To the Daisy’ signals its release from stately passions by adopting as epigraph some lines from George Wither’s The Shepherd’s Hunting, ‘Eclogue 4’, which are addressed to his muse:

Along with related works by Drayton and Jonson, conveniently extracted in Robert Anderson’s Poets of Great Britain (1795), a collection that Wordsworth read, devotedly and closely, from 1800, Wither’s lines provide a touchstone for the celebration of the bare, innocent life that is represented in ‘To the Daisy’. Opening with a recollection of ‘youth’, a period of self-bafflement when ‘from rock to rock I went,/From hill to hill in discontent/Of pleasure high and turbulent,/Most pleased when most uneasy’ (ll. 1–4), the poem is not, however, entirely released from worldly concerns. The oxymoronic yoking of ‘discontent’ and ‘pleasure’ conveys well the sense of a mind at odds with itself, in striking anticipation of ‘the experience of internal disruption’ that Jacques Khalip identifies as ‘a form of wartime ontology’.³³ Still, for Wordsworth, the hope endures that release from conflict may be found in this time: ‘But now’, the poet proclaims, ‘my own delights I make,—/My thirst at every rill can slake,/And gladly Nature’s love partake’ (ll. 5–7). To this boast of self-determination, the poem gives way to a serial depiction of the daisy’s triumph over time and change. In learning to love the daisy, as generic species, Wordsworth sees in the flower’s ability to withstand seasonal change, and its indifference to worldly acclaim, the design of a life released from constitutional antagonism.

Thus, reflecting on the daisy’s thoughtlessness, the poet loses, albeit briefly, both the sense of terror involved in staying alive and the sense of melancholy that attends the coming of peace.³⁴ As intimated by Kant, the desire for perpetual peace, for a state of being delivered from agonistic competition, belongs to the ‘End of All Things’ (1794) in which ‘reason does not understand either itself or what it wants […] because people would like at last to have an eternal tranquillity in which to rejoice, constituting for them a supposedly blessed end of all things; but really this is a concept in which the understanding is simultaneously exhausted and all thinking itself has an end’.³⁵ Kant’s account of post-war melancholy is echoed in the numerous public pronouncements that followed, in print, in parliament, and in pulpit, the declaration of the 1802 peace. Despite declarations of enthusiasm for the peace, uniting loyalists and liberals alike in expressions of relief and patriotic fervour,³⁶ the fear persists that the blessings of peace will replace the manly vigour of wartime competition with carnal indulgences, effeminate languor, and terminal inertia.³⁷ Following the signing of the definitive Treaty of Paris in 1815, images of exhaustion, wastage, and ennui would once again come to the fore, most notably in the self-cancelling despair of Byron’s Manfred (1817), the valetudinarian lethargy of Austen’s ‘Sanditon’ (1817), and in the burnt-out cases of Keats’s ‘Hyperion: A Fragment’ (1819).

An attempt to imagine post-war restoration not as the sad, slow erasure of individual and corporate vitality but as the occasion for blissful participation in the life of the world is set out in ‘To the Daisy’. Taking its cue from a cancelled passage in ‘The Ruined Cottage’ MS. D, in which the ‘impious warfare’ of division and ‘disconnection’ yields to the embrace of the ‘one life’ in which ‘All things shall live in us, and we shall live/In all things that surround us’,³⁸ ‘To the Daisy’ conveys its release from the burden of self-consciousness through anaphoric indeterminacy and an accumulation of abstract qualities detached from the grasp of an overseeing ‘I’:

Commenting on these lines, Gregory Leadbetter observes: ‘The rich dance of thought in this list includes love, delight, memory, fancy, invention—presented as unpredictable forms of grace […], with an unfixedness that allows for the “stray” and even the “wrong”’.³⁹ Leadbetter is right to call this movement a ‘rich dance’, but we cannot quite evade the uneasiness encoded in the bluntly stressed tail-rhymes ‘apprehension’ and ‘invention’, as if creation itself were, in some way, partnered ineluctably with traces of anxiety and alarm. It might not be easy, still less blissful, to find oneself released from the zeal for self-governance only to become lost in a realm of fleeting fixities. But equally, one might find it impossible to endure those stately passions that prompt the thought of permanence. A ‘chance look’ (l. 50) at the flower is enough to dissolve that imposing posture, allowing the self to take a ‘lowlier pleasure’ in ‘The homely sympathy that heeds/The common life our nature breeds’ (ll. 52–6). If ‘common life’ reminds us of the ‘one life’ there is, as Leadbetter suggests, ‘less implication of supernatural metaphysical insight here’ (l. 228), but Wordsworth points nonetheless to an order of experience freighted with significance. In the collective ‘our nature’, and the glad, animal-like audacity of ‘breeds’, the poet is aligned with forms of life that appear indifferent to the correlation of Being and Thought. Leisure and play are the operative words in the lines that follow, allowing poet and flower to delight in ‘kindred gladness’ (l. 60) while avoiding the temptation to ground such points of contact in the notion of a universal lifeworld. Reluctant to pin down this experience, the poet embraces a form of cultivated vagueness: ‘An instinct call it, a blind sense;/A happy genial influence,/Coming one knows not how, nor whence,/Nor whither going’ (ll. 69–72). Here is tranquillity of a different order to the emphasis on peace as the ‘silent horizon’ of foundational violence.⁴⁰ By eschewing definition and participating in collective joy, Wordsworthian peace, at least in this incarnation, departs from the tensile knot in which release from war can only be imagined as life-denying extinction.

First printed in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, ‘To the Daisy’ reappears in 1815 at the head of Poems of the Fancy, as categorised by Wordsworth in the collected Poems, a work that appeared in print in the very month that Napoleon returned from exile to dramatically reignite the war against France. In the Preface to this edition Wordsworth remarks that the ‘law under which the processes of Fancy are carried on is as capricious as the accidents of things, and the effects are surprising, playful, ludicrous, amusing, tender, or pathetic, as the objects happen to be appositely produced or fortunately combined’ (Prose III. 36–7). The sense of momentary, otiose enthralment realised in ‘rapidity and profusion’, and the ‘felicity’ with which ‘thoughts and images’ are ‘linked together’, allows Fancy its brief triumph over ‘the indestructible dominion’ of Imagination. As Wordsworth memorably concludes: ‘Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part of our nature, Imagination to incite and to support the eternal’.⁴¹ Inviolate and eternal, the Imagination bears some structural resemblance to the notion of peace as a state of eternal rest. By contrast, Fancy appears to have something in common with notions of process, even of assemblage, in its devotion to rapidity, profusion, and linkage.⁴² In the 1800 note to ‘the Thorn’, Wordsworth delineates the character of those ‘Superstitious men’ who, ‘with a reasonable share of imagination’, are yet ‘utterly destitute of fancy, the power by which pleasure and surprize are excited by sudden varieties of situation and by accumulated imagery’: ‘their minds are not loose but adhesive’.⁴³ As a creative faculty, Fancy shares with Imagination the ability to ‘aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine’ (Prose III. 36), but while Imagination abstracts and modifies its materials, affecting changes ‘proceeding from, and governed by, a sublime consciousness of the soul in her own mighty and almost divine powers’,⁴⁴ Fancy dwells among ‘the slight, the limited, and evanescent’,⁴⁵ eschewing consciousness of self for protean delight in the shifting surfaces of the world.

With echoes of the ‘wraithlike mutation—whether understood as endless production or endless dissolution—of Self into Other’ to be found in John ‘Walking’ Stewart’s The Revelation of Nature (1795),⁴⁶ Fancy, as it is developed in the 1815 Preface, counters the emphasis on militant individuation that one might assume in Wordsworth’s post-war writing. Of relevance here is David Fairer’s account of ‘Walking’ Stewart’s ‘panbiomorphic universe’ in which there is no such thing as ‘positive or absolute identity’ but living organisations of matter ‘emerging through the continual alternation of incremental and excremental dynamics within nature (like the ebb and flow of the tide)’.⁴⁷ As a temporary mode of common substance, human identity is no different from a flower, a river, or a drop of rain. To be caught up in those glad animations that ‘had no need of a remoter charm/By thought supplied’ is thus to reconceptualise individuality as a form of Spinozian conatus,⁴⁸ or confederate striving, distinct in kind from the Cartesian emphasis on the separation of mind and body, but characterised, above all, by a sense of universal delight in the inter-animation of all material things: ‘The budding twigs spread out their fan,/To catch the breezy air;/And I must think, do all I can,/That there was pleasure there’.⁴⁹

The peace that may be found in conatus, with its emphasis on alternating states of ‘motion and rest, speed and slowness’, is markedly different from the state of melancholy inertia envisaged by Kant.⁵⁰ In Chapters 1, 2, and 4 I will have more to say about how peace, founded in conatus, is represented in ‘The Recluse’, The White Doe of Rylstone, and The Waggoner, but in advance of this reading I should like to anticipate and respond to concerns regarding the ‘politically open-ended and even utopian’ aspects of the account of Wordsworthian peace that has been presented so far.⁵¹ It is generally assumed, and with good reason, that political open-endedness and utopianism cannot be found in Wordsworth’s post-war poetry – that is, in the poetry Wordsworth wrote and published after Waterloo – but we need not deviate into counter-factual realms to discover lingering traces of that early attachment to the poetics and politics of Fancy. The appearance in the 1815 collection of a second poem entitled ‘To the Daisy’ (‘With little here to do or see’),⁵² dating again from the early 1800s, makes explicit the flower’s ability to generate associations dissociated from conscious control, to discover in ‘Loose types of Things through all degrees’ (l. 11) the resources for a reimagining of the world as an inter-animated realm of mutually constitutive motions and affections, a world in which freedom is recognised in and through aesthetic play as the necessity of contingency. To read ‘To the Daisy’ in 1815 is to allow oneself to participate, however briefly, in a dynamic process of loss and gain, a process in which the dissolution of identity may be attended by feelings of pleasure as well as pain. Assisted by the adoption of Drayton’s eight-line rime couée, a pattern used to great effect in the mock-epic fairy tale Nimphidia and echoed more recently in Burns’s modification of standard Habbie, the reader is swiftly absorbed by the poem’s incantatory rhyme scheme. Adrift in the ‘humour of the game’ (l. 15), the reader also becomes entangled in a ‘web’ of ‘similies’ (1. 10): ‘Nuns demure […]/Or sprightly Maiden’ (ll. 17–18); a bejewelled Queen and a ‘Starveling in a scanty vest’ (ll. 21–2); a little Cyclops ‘Staring to threaten and defy’ (l. 25); a fairy shield ‘In fight to cover’ (l. 30). Carried forward in joyful vigour, the poem dallies with Horace’s satirical depiction of woman as the ‘most terrible cause of war’,⁵³ tracing a course through three states of female maturation – virginal seclusion, sexual awakening, and sovereign power – to end with mock-heroic images of masculine defiance. But if this immersion in the associative chains of romance implies a departure from the sterner business of sense making, we are reminded too in the comparison between the ‘fair’ daisy (l. 35) and the ‘Self-poised’ star (l. 40) of ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’, a poem that forges fanciful similes to simultaneously confront and waylay the stark reality of loss.

‘To the Daisy’ is no doubt too delicate a creation to sustain such troubling thoughts, but that of course is the point, for whatever ‘thought comes next […] instantly/The freak is over,/The shape will vanish’ (ll. 27–9). Thus, as ‘To the Same Flower’ (‘Bright Flower!’) enjoins, deliverance from the consciousness of death may be found in the life of ‘A thoughtless thing’ (l. 10): ‘Meek, yielding to the occasion’s call/And all things suffering from all’ (ll. 20–21). But just as in the Hegelian model of art consciousness is led through its engagement with thoughtlessness to an awareness of its estrangement from nature prior to its arrival in the higher, dialectical stage in which the conflicts and antimonies of philosophical reasoning are at last overcome, so the daisy’s absence of thought is surveyed from the perspective of a point beyond the laws of time, change, and contingency: ‘Thy function apostolical/In peace fulfilling’ (ll. 23–4). Here, then, we return to the notion of peace as the melancholy remainder of war – a condition ‘outside being’ that, by virtue of its exceptional status, serves at once to confirm and deny the possibility of a messianic suspension of hostilities.⁵⁴ Yet when surveyed as an aspect of the ‘unassuming Common-place/Of Nature’ (‘To the Daisy’: ‘With little here to do or see’, ll. 5–6), the daisy, delighting in its protean existence, appears indeed to manifest all the signs of a life delivered from the struggle for individuation. And it is in this sense that the world of justice, of a life redeemed because of its openness to the world and its irreparability, would seem to have been fulfilled.

Still, it might be argued that the conclusion of ‘To the Same Flower’ suggests a more conventionally eschatological stance: the promise of that ‘eternal spring’, celebrated by Milton and Cowper, when, at the end of days, the world is ‘delivered from the bondage of corruption’ (Romans 8. 21).⁵⁵ Wordsworth himself appears to have wrestled with the theological implications of his daisy poems. To Isabella Fenwick Wordsworth expressed surprise that some readers should consider ‘“Thy function apostolical” as being little less than profane. How could it be thought so? The word is adopted with reference to its derivation implying something sent on a mission; &, assuredly, this little flower, especially when the subject of verse, may be regarded, in its humble degree, as administering both to moral & to spiritual purposes’.⁵⁶ Like the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, the daisy depicted in ‘To the Same Flower’ might be read as a prefiguration of Christ: ‘For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him’ (Isaiah 53. 2). The audacity of reversing the direction of the simile no doubt accounts for the charge of profanity, but the parallels with Isaiah 53 root the poem in Christian orthodoxy, allowing the ‘Pilgrim’ (l. 2) flower, ‘whose home is everywhere’ (l. 1), to serve as an emblem of ‘hope for times that are unkind’ (l. 15). In its function as a missionary, the daisy ‘wanderest the wide world about’ (l. 17), providing humanity with a lesson in how to withstand the temptations of ‘pride’ and ‘scrupulous doubt’ (l. 18), along with the effects of neglect and approbation. Assisted by the inverted syntax and present participle of ‘Thy function apostolical/In peace fulfilling’, the daisy, as apostle, speaks of a peace that has already arrived.⁵⁷

Something of what it might be like to encounter peace in the world in which we live, rather than at the end of days, is given in ‘To the Daisy’ (‘Sweet Flower! belike one day to have’), a poem written during the period of suspense when, for six weeks, John Wordsworth’s body lay unclaimed ‘beneath the moving Sea’ (l. 36).⁵⁸ Composed in late May–July 1805, and added to the 1815 Poems, ‘Sweet Flower!’ cements from the outset the daisy’s association with peace, justice, and the life that is to come. Meditating on John’s death, Wordsworth perceives in the loss of that silent poet an intimation of his own demise when, no longer subject to the commanding ‘Word!’ (l. 29), the ‘gentle Soul and sweet’ will join the flower ‘in undisturbed retreat’ (l. 48). Drawing on John’s description of the sight of daisies ‘after sunset […] like little white stars upon the dark green fields’,⁵⁹ ‘Sweet Flower!’ discerns in their ‘starry multitude’ (l. 28) an image of life released from the struggle for recognition. Peace is often defined as ‘the absence of war’,⁶⁰ impossible to imagine, that is, outside of an ontology founded on and informed by hostility. Yet in ‘Sweet Flower’ witness is granted to a world in which life is no longer orientated around a perilous core of self-division. Sufficient unto itself and at peace with others, the daisy posits a form of life after death that is at once imminent and transcendent, transient and eternal, suggesting the possibility of a world in which even the injustices suffered by the fallen can be redeemed in the here and now, a point to which I will return, in the context of further reflections on the death of John, in Chapters 3 and 5.

In Wordsworth’s daisy poems, then, we gain a glimpse, yet no more than a glimpse, of what peace might look like: a ‘happy, genial influence’, a ‘kindred gladness’; peace as a place of suspension between the human and the non-human; peace as the reign of contingency; peace as absolute hospitality; peace as the establishment of non-juridical Justice. Underlying all these formulations, and indeed encoded in the linking of one formulation to another, an activity akin to the fanciful production of similes, or more appositely to the weaving of a daisy chain, is the idea, formulated by Walter Benjamin, of peace conceived as a means rather than as an end. In ‘Toward the Critique of Violence’, Benjamin identifies non-violent conflict resolution as neither a means to an end nor an end in itself but rather as a technique that exceeds instrumental or teleological reasoning. For Benjamin, peace is an open-ended, ongoing practice, distinct from the juridical drawing up of contracts that Rousseau and Kant regard as the source of conflict. As technique, therefore, peace is manifested in discussion or, to be more precise, in the ‘proper sphere of “coming-to-understanding”’ that is ‘language as such’.⁶¹ As a manifestation of what Benjamin goes on to describe as ‘divine violence’,⁶² language as such, in its disregard for law-preserving boundaries, evokes a mode of peace that is active in the everyday even as it gestures towards a time of fulfilment that has yet to arrive.

Responding to Benjamin’s ‘Critique’, Giorgio Agamben writes of peace conceived not as pax but as otium, ‘a word whose uncertain correspondences with Indo-European languages (Gr. αϋσιος empty, Gr. αϋτως in vain; Gothic aupeis, empty; Isl. aud, desert) hover around the semantic field of emptiness and the absence of finality’.⁶³ Used originally by the Roman military to describe the periods of leisure experienced by soldiers in between bouts of conflict, otium offers a playful alternative to the state of posthumous nullity in which peace has been habitually conceived. As the daisy teaches us, peace is not a state in which we dwell but rather one in which we ‘sojourn—nocturnal, patient, homeless—in non-recognition’.⁶⁴ Displaying none of the symptoms of nostalgia, the malady that in the eighteenth-century came to be associated with the displaced victims of war,⁶⁵ there is a sense in which Wordsworth’s affirmation of the flower’s uprootedness, focussed on the image of an object that is at once homeless but whose home is everywhere, marks a departure from the near-compulsive attention given to the destruction or absence of the home in Wordsworth’s early anti-war poetry. Markedly different in tone from ‘The Female Vagrant’, ‘The Discharged Soldier’, ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’, and ‘The Ruined Cottage’ – poems in which conflict is responsible for social conditions that force ordinary men, women, and children to wander the earth in fugue-like states, exiled from homes that may or may not exist or that fall into desuetude while their occupants return to the ground – the daisy poems reveal that ‘Peace is the perfect empty sky of humanity; it is the display of non-appearance as the only homeland of man’.⁶⁶ The idea that the drive to satisfy such a basic want as shelter can be overcome, and that openness to a form of radical homelessness might erase the competition for land and property that leads to conflict, takes Wordsworth in directions that appear untenable; yet, as we shall discover, the poetry that Wordsworth publishes after war raises important questions about the reimagining of hospitality when homes are subject to ruin.⁶⁷

***

How these daisy poems, with their affirmative yet, at times, unsettling visions of life after war, were understood by the early readers of Our English Lakes, Mountains, and Waterfalls may not, of course, be determined. Denounced in 1815 as ‘trifles’ by the Augustan Review,⁶⁸ and condemned for their ‘exuberant sensibility’ by the Quarterly Review,⁶⁹ Wordsworth’s poems of Fancy appeared at the close of the First Great War to be woefully out of step with the times, and there is little evidence to suggest that readers in 1915 felt any differently – unless, that is, we consider how closely Wordsworth was taken to heart by ordinary soldiers of the line, as this picture illustrates (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Soldiers of the Machine Gun Corps (c. 1916–1918).

Source: The Louis and Antoinette Thuillier Collection. Courtesy of the Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth.

Paul Fussell has described how modernists, such as Herbert Reed, viewed Wordsworth’s poetry as ‘hopelessly sentimental and archaic’, a poetry of ‘synthesis’ no longer at home in a landscape ravaged by heavy bombardment.⁷⁰ Such antipathy may have been provoked by attempts at the beginning of the war to claim Wordsworth as ‘the Poet for the Trenches—the Minstrel for the Offensive’, singling out the patriotic sonnets and ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’ as confirmation of the poet’s suitability for the part.⁷¹ But other readers, like the men identified as ‘We Are Seven’, appear to have responded to something other than sentiment or bombast in Wordsworth: a capacity for irony; a refusal of easy consolation; a determination to believe in the continuity of life after death, despite evidence to the contrary, or perhaps more straightforwardly, but no less radically, the sense of a better world. A clue to how Wordsworth’s poetry might have been understood by such men is given in Edmund Blunden’s ‘A House in Festubert’, a lyric account of a bombed-out house that, ‘with gashes black, itself one wound’ (l. 3), provides shelter to those ‘who laugh unkilled’ (l. 9).⁷² Transplanted from ‘Tintern Abbey’, the hermit who ‘might have built a cell/Among those evergreens’ (ll. 16–17) is forced into hiding, jeopardised by the ‘hum’ (l. 21) of ‘steel-born bees’ (l. 24). In Blunden’s conflicted pastoral, the acceptance of impermanence, of rapidly shifting juxtapositions and violent amalgamations, has become a condition of life. Yet still, antique notions of joy in widest commonality spread persist, offering, in ways that surmount the crushing weight of irony, a sense of accord with those creatures who, ‘fond of summer’ (l. 23), find love amid the ruins.

Might A. H. S., the unknown soldier whose name has fallen from Our English Lakes, Mountains, and Waterfalls, have found common cause with the idea that in the daisy ‘there abides […] Some concord with humanity’ (‘Bright Flower’, l. 6)? Perhaps the image of that flower finding ‘shelter under every wind’ (l. 14) in ‘times that are unkind’ (l. 15), ‘Meek, yielding to the occasion’s call,/And all things suffering from all’, would have struck a chord with a soldier enduring the deprivations of war. The recognition of ‘concord’ with a flower ‘whose home is everywhere’ (l. 1) may well have provided the soldier and his family with some degree of comfort, a reminder that, amidst the horrors of war, peace may yet be found. And there is the possibility, too, that through recognition of the flower’s vulnerability, at risk of destruction ‘from a freak of power,/Or from involuntary act of hand/Or foot unruly with excess of life’, a soldier might ‘stop/Self-question’d, asking wherefore that was done’.⁷³ In that concurrence of attitudes, spanning distinctions of space and time, minds and bodies, Wordsworth’s daisies announce the possibility of a life regained.

England in 1802

In March 1802 Wordsworth composed ‘The Sailor’s Mother’, a poem that, in its focus on an encounter with a wandering victim of the war, echoes ‘Old Man Travelling’ and ‘The Discharged Soldier’. Beneath her cloak the indigent woman conceals a bird and cage, property of the son who ‘many a day/Sail’d on the seas’ but now ‘is dead’ and ‘cast away’ (ll. 21–2).⁷⁴ The woman explains that the ‘Singing-bird’ (l. 28) accompanied her son on many voyages, but when ‘last he sail’d’ he left the bird behind, ‘As might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind’ (ll. 29–30). Saved, then, from extinction, the bird may ‘pipe its song in safety’ while serving as a tangible reminder of the son’s ‘delight’ (l. 35) in the life of the world. Holding on to that life, the mother connects with the son, but we might also see in this ‘transmutation of wars casualties into song’ a means of surmounting personal and collective grief.⁷⁵ To carry lyric delight while adrift on the roads of England is to state one’s faith in the healing mission of poetry after war. The work that Wordsworth undertook in the productive spring and summer of 1802 – the new edition of Lyrical Ballads, ‘Resolution and Independence’, the ‘Immortality Ode’, and the outpouring of bird, flower, and butterfly poems – gives some indication of how that mission would be carried forward. But other poems dating from this period display more discomforting thoughts and feelings. And all this at a time when peace had enabled the possibility of a reunion with Annette Vallon and the poet’s first meeting with their daughter, Caroline – a meeting that would serve as a settling of accounts prior to the poet’s wedding to Mary Hutchinson in the autumn.

To tease out these counter-currents in Wordsworth’s post-war poetry, first as they presented themselves in 1802–3 and then as they re-emerged in the wake of Napoleon’s first and second defeats, let us attend to two poems, hiding in the shadows of Amiens, that express fears of how the poetics of Fancy might waylay the ‘manly strain of nat’ral poesy’.⁷⁶ In ‘The Barberry-Tree’, an air of cultivated uncertainty places the utopian leanings of Fancy in abeyance, subjecting its pacific charms to anaphoric doubt and moral dubiety. Thus, riffing on themes that would emerge, with greater precision, in ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, the poet speculates on whether the breeze that animates the tree feels the same pleasures ‘that ev’n now/In my breast are springing’ (ll. 23–4) and whether ‘Those golden blossoms dancing high’ (l. 27) have ‘in themselves of joy a store’ (l. 28), only to conclude that ‘If living sympathy be theirs’ (l. 37), if ‘the piping breeze and dancing tree/Are all alive and glad as we’ (ll. 39–40), ‘I cannot tell, I do not know […] I do not know, I cannot tell’ (ll. 42–4). Still, as if in a trance, the poet stands statue-like, transfixed by the scene, only to be roused from his reverie by the plangent sound of church bells. Unfinished and irresolute, suggestive of pleasures unknown to poets of more sober disposition, pleasures that may, as the puzzling allusion to Peter Grimes suggests (‘I to Grimes had pledg’d my word’, l. 60), lead to criminality, guilt, and ostracisation, ‘The Barberry-Tree’ tests the limits of Fancy, granting visions of gleeful release from the antagonistic labour of being that, for all the charm of nature’s ‘whispering sounds’ (l. 72), must, for the sake of the peace, remain in thrall to the call of Anglican authority.

Fancy cannot be trusted to speak so consistently on behalf of the cause of peace, and the accession to gentle dissolution in the shifting motions of the world provides only a partial account of how Wordsworth’s poetry responds to the aftermath of war. The Peace of Amiens, while broadly welcomed by a populace eager for relief from the social and economic burdens of the war, was nevertheless viewed by many observers with a mingled sense of apathy and distrust. The general denunciation of sloth, effeminacy, and self-indulgence that emerged in debates around this time concerning the effects of peace on the national character shades no less into the discourse of poetry. Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘How sweet it is when mother Fancy rocks’ grants direct expression to this mood of oneiric distraction, likening Fancy’s seductive appeal to a ‘bonny Lass’ at a country fair, who ‘plays her pranks’ (l. 6) ‘While she stands cresting the Clown’s head, and mocks/The crowd beneath her’ (ll. 8–9).⁷⁷ Though momentarily distracted ‘with such gleam/Of all things’ (ll. 12–13), the ‘wayward brain’ (l. 2), overwhelmed by ceaseless novelty, causes the poet to ‘shrink’ in ‘fear’ and to ‘leap at once from the delicious stream’ (ll. 13–14). With its confusing investment in feminine archetypes – Fancy is both a deceiving mother and a coquettish girl, the poet resembles Arethusa fleeing from the river god Alpheus, as depicted by Ovid – the sonnet becomes a performance of the sort of trouble that a work of pure fancy can bring to the world.⁷⁸ Unhoused and ungentle, the female figures represented in this poem belie the conception of peace as a welcoming mother, offering comfort and reassurance to her war-ravaged sons; instead, the girl assails the poet like a ‘wandering Mountebank’ (l. 7), transforming ‘the whole world […] link by link’ (l. 11) into an uncanny and ungraspable hyper-object, a ceaselessly proliferating realm of unreality far removed from the state of peace in which gendered identities are stabilised and things are objectively present.⁷⁹

Beneath the peace, a battle rages, infecting even the most seemingly pacific of discourses. For Wordsworth, this other war is evident in poetry, and not least when poetry seeks to overcome its relationship with dissonance and division, offering in plain sight a vision of concord founded in conflict. Given what has been said so far about the warlike undercurrents of the poetry eventually collected in Poems, in Two Volumes, readers may not have been surprised to discover, at the head of the volume, the Virgilian motto ‘Posterius graviore sono tibi Musa loquetur/Nostra: dabunt cum securos mihi tempora fructus’ (‘Hereafter shall our Muse speak to thee in deeper tones, when the seasons yield me their fruits in peace’).⁸⁰ Notwithstanding that on the surface the motto may be read as an apology for the volume’s apparent lightness of tone (‘To the Daisy’ is the opening verse), the word securos (an inflection of securus, meaning ‘without care’) would have resonated with readers for whom questions of national security were a daily concern. As Brian Folker points out, the English translation of securos as ‘peace’ is misleading, since unlike the state of irenic self-containment described by ‘pax’, securos designates peace as a condition that is ‘by implication circumscribed, surrounded by a larger realm of less desirable conditions’.⁸¹ At best, the volume suggests, we may look forward to a time that is secure from anxiety, danger, or pain but not to a time in which such threats have come to an end.

In light of this qualification, it is helpful to think about the 1807 volume’s most famous exploration of peaceable life, the ‘Immortality’ ode. Composed on 27 March 1802, a date coincident with the conclusion of the peace settlement, the opening four stanzas of the ode convey feelings of deflation and defeat, offering echoes of rejuvenation, of a world in ‘bliss’ (l. 41), only to reduce the thrill of that ‘timely utterance’ (l. 23) to blank indifference: ‘the Pansy at my feet/Doth the same tale repeat’ (ll. 54–5).⁸² While other flowers bloomed in this uneasy spring, reprising that older, Spinozian faith in festive joy, the jerky enchantments and disenchantments of the ode – a form traditionally offered on a day of national thanksgiving – gave vent to thoughts of private grief at odds with the season of collective renewal. Marjorie Levinson has claimed that the Peace, which privileged the imperial regime, underlining the duplicity of the revolutionary experiment and the errors of its first principles, amplified the gap between Wordsworth’s benighted Jacobin ‘first affections’ and his mid-life identification as a patriot and loyalist.⁸³ Levinson goes on to read the ode as an attempt to close this gap by folding the opening recollections of lost revolutionary glory – conveyed by the anaphoric insistence and rhyming present participles of lines 35–50 – into a radically conservative narrative of consolation and compromise. Understood as a poem articulating the transition from melancholy to mourning, the ode laments the loss of the instinctive pleasures of youth, the ‘simple creed’ of ‘Delight and liberty’ (l. 141), only to discover recompense for their passing in the transition from heedless joy to sober reflection. In ‘thoughts that spring/Out of human suffering’ (ll. 186–7), ‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’ (l. 206), the pansy’s lost glory is recollected, tenderly but without pain, in ‘the meanest flower that blows’ (l. 205). Reduced to an abstracted, correlationist object, its fullness of being jettisoned to the other side of that ‘eternal Silence’ (l. 158) that separates Man and God, the pansy ceases to trouble the poet with feelings of rapture; now, having relinquished instinctive ‘delight’ (l. 193) to live beneath a more ‘habitual sway’ (l. 194), the poet can repeat, in finer tone, the procedural dreariness that quelled those early recollections of revolutionary bliss, reconfiguring that period’s ‘noisy years’ (l. 157) in the quiet imprecision of that ‘peace which passeth all understanding’ (Philippians 4.7). Thus, Wordsworth ‘will grieve not’ (l. 183) for the loss of that profane, effervescent time in which the ‘senselessness of joy was sublime’;⁸⁴ now the holiday is over, and Amiens has shown how ‘peace itself is a coded war’,⁸⁵ the poet will turn to the ‘faith that looks through death’ (l. 188), projecting into that inaccessible and unrealisable beyond the impression of a life delivered from enmity and strife.

In Chapters 3 and 5 we will consider the ode again, setting its chronicle of ideological continuity within the larger contexts of the 1816 Thanksgiving volume and the 1820 Miscellaneous Poems. In these chapters we will see how the complex sequence of emotional, geographical, and legal manoeuvres that Wordsworth undertook during the Peace of Amiens resonated in subsequent post-war writings – most notably in poems published after Waterloo and after Peterloo. Eric C. Walker has written persuasively of how marriage serves in post-war culture as a form of conflict resolution, healing divisions exacerbated by armed struggle, offering the promise of enduring peace.⁸⁶ Might those victims of conflict portrayed in the anti-war poetry of the 1790s, wandering souls bereft of husbands, wives, sons, and homes, be exorcised now that war had come to an end? Certainly, the treaty of 1802 provided Wordsworth with the means to resolve at least one, highly personal, case of estrangement: the marriage that did not take place with Annette Vallon and the settlement that was not bestowed on the child of that unsanctioned union. The marriage to Mary Hutchinson that followed in the wake of this meeting would grant to Wordsworth the promise of restitution, enabling through union with a native of Cumberland the healing of those geopolitical and psychological divisions forced by Britain’s entry into war. The epigraph to the ‘Immortality’ ode, taken from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, is, in this respect, and when considered in light of the volume’s opening motto, apposite: Paulò majora canamus – a plea for songs of higher import from a poem written in anticipation of a new golden age, heralded by the Peace of Brundisium and affirmed by the wedding of Antonius and Octavia.

Yet, even as Wordsworth’s settlement with the past was enacted, traces of that old, revolutionary enthusiasm would return to haunt the poet, requiring further, strenuous, acts of containment. It is in the sonnets that Wordsworth composed during his stay in Calais over the summer that the effort to quell the promptings of the past is most overtly expressed. Precisely dated and, for the most part, prosaically titled, the Calais sonnets document the poet’s attempts to overcome a gathering sense of estrangement on revisiting sites that, a decade before, had offered the hope of lasting, communal peace.⁸⁷ Adrift in this uncannily familiar setting, the former Jacobin seeks relief from the recollection of those ‘festivals of new-born Liberty’, long since reduced to a ‘hollow word’, in the image of a child sheltered ‘in Abraham’s bosom’.⁸⁸ Discovered at the close of a poem that clusters around a snapshot portrayal of a father and daughter walking along the beach at Calais, the divine child, most likely Caroline, the poet’s illegitimate daughter, bears a striking resemblance to those blessed children in the ‘Immortality’ ode who, no longer subject to the transitory gladness of the Revolution, ‘sport upon the shore’ of an ‘immortal sea’ (ll. 164–70). But the sonnet’s allusion to Luke 16.22, in which the faithful are gathered up into eternal life, signals the trace of that other, more disturbing, Abrahamic story: the account of the child called to sacrifice by the word of God. To dwell in ‘that imperial palace’ (‘Immortality’ ode, l. 84) from whence she came, the child must be detached from all that is at enmity with the holy, the calm, and the free.⁸⁹ That ‘homeless sound of joy’ (‘To a Friend, Composed near Calais, on the Road Leading to Andres, August 7th, 1802’, l. 5), materialised in the festal atmosphere of 1790 and invoked mechanically by the zombie citizens of 1802, must either be housed, expelled, or consigned to a time of ‘Fair seasons’ in which political ‘despair’ will be effaced by ‘hopes as fair’ (ll. 12–14).

Soon after his return to England, in ‘Composed in the Valley, near Dover, on the Day of landing’,⁹⁰ Wordsworth discovers the peace that was denied to him in France, finding joy in ‘Kent’s green vales’ (l. 7) as, lulled by the anti-alarum of ‘the Smoke that curls’ (l. 2) and soothed by the sounds of church bells and ‘this little river’s gentle roar’ (l. 5), white-shirted boys play cricket in the meadow ground. But while the fair hopes of ‘To a Friend, Composed near Calais’ appear to have been realised in the appreciation of these demilitarised and, crucially, native sights and sounds, the dismissal of the likely return to conflict (‘Europe is yet in Bonds; but let that pass’, l. 9) is limned, nevertheless, by thoughts of the transience of peace, by concern that ‘joy enough’ is not enough and that ‘perfect bliss’ (ll. 11–12) cannot be sustained while discord looms. Despite the poet’s best efforts to protect the happy hour from the intrusion of conflicted thoughts, the sonnet foresees that other ‘moment’ (l. 10) in which the freedom that is to be found in aesthetic play is supplanted by the recognition of violent necessity.

Sadly, then, in the Calais sonnets, the prospect of lasting peace remains elusive, and war continues to serve as the arena in which individual and collective identity is forged. Within a few months, following the collapse of the peace accord, the passage from imagined fears to present anxieties would find direct expression in ‘To the Men of Kent. October, 1803’, ‘Anticipation. October, 1803’, and ‘October, 1803’ (‘Six thousand Veterans practis’d in War’s game’). In these invasion sonnets, the readiness with which the king’s subjects subscribe to the defence of the realm suggests that, for Wordsworth, the breach between individual conscience and collective will, a breach evinced in The Prelude’s account of how the young republican sulked when prayers were raised for the victory in the war against France, has at last begun to heal. To commit to war is to commit, then, to the belief in the general equivalence of war, politics, and reality; it is to accept that war is the crucible in which individual and collective identity is forged. Such a belief may well have prompted the poet to volunteer his services to the Grasmere militia – a gesture that prompted Dorothy to declare: ‘surely there never was a more determined hater of the French nor one more determined to destroy them if they really do come’ (EY 403).

Might Wordsworth have found some pleasure in acceding to this thanatoid belief? Published in the Morning Post in April 1803, on the facing page of an editorial expressing hope for ‘real peace, or actual and vigorous war’,⁹¹ ‘It is not to be thought of that the flood’ is markedly different in tone from the pacifying sentiments of the poet’s initial foray into political sonneteering. In ‘I griev’d for Buonaparte’, ‘Books, leisure’, and ‘the talk/Man holds with week-day man’ (ll. 10–11) are prized over success in ‘battles’ (l. 5),⁹² but signs of growing dissatisfaction with England’s post-war greed and complacency, evident in ‘The world is too much with us’ (‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers’, l. 2),⁹³ as well as ‘Written in London. September, 1802’ (‘No grandeur now in nature or in book/Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expence,/This is idolatory; and these we adore’, ll. 8–10),⁹⁴ are fully realised in ‘It is not to be thought’. Alluding to a passage from Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars (‘“with pomp of waters, unwithstood”’, l. 4),⁹⁵ the poet displays some disappointment that the ‘freights’ of liberty should be born to ‘foreign lands’ (l. 6), leaving ‘this most famous Stream’ to ‘perish’ in ‘Bogs and Sands’ (ll. 7–8) – a sentiment that chimes with the anti-expansionism of ‘England! the time is come when thou shouldst wean/Thy heart from its emasculating food’ (ll. 1–2).⁹⁶ To bring freedom home, however, it is necessary that the nation should expose itself to the threat of annihilation and have done, once and for all, with its vitiating obsession with commercial prosperity, a belief echoed by the Morning Post in its chary notice of a rally on the stock market as hopes were raised for a renewed settlement with France. Thus, in anticipation of Wordsworth’s later engagement with the sacrificial origins of the classical sacred spring tradition, most evident in The River Duddon and Ecclesiastical Sketches, the poet affirms that ‘the Flood/Of British freedom’ is ‘sprung/Of Earth’s first blood’ (ll. 13–14), a claim that responds to the recollection of those ‘invincible Knights of old’ (l. 10) who, rejecting worldly gain for spiritual worth, give up their lives in defence of the realm.

The rousing imperative at the core of ‘It is not to be thought’, ‘We must be free or die’ (l. 11), a phrase uttered in the ‘tongue/That Shakespeare spake’ (ll. 11–12) and enshrined in the ‘faith and morals’ of Milton (l. 13), is carried forward to the October 1803 invasion sonnets. In ‘To the Men of Kent’ the poet desires that ‘words of invitation’ (l. 5) be sent to France so that parleying may cease, and war may commence.⁹⁷ In this climate of dialogic collapse, the enemy appears transfixed by the sight of ‘glittering’ lances (l. 7) as, transformed into emblems of British liberty, the Men of Kent, who once, as boys, played on the meadow-ground, respond with ‘one breath’ (l. 12) to the ontologically self-cancelling, but sonically harmonious, command: ‘’tis Victory or Death!’ (l. 14). At the end of war, at the limit of expression, only a dactylic ‘Shout’ (l. 1) remains, heralding in ‘Anticipation. October, 1803’ the beating of drums and the blowing of trumpets that disturb the sleep of the foreign dead.⁹⁸ In this poem’s disturbing vision of a successfully defended homeland, with corpses ‘lying in the silent sun’ (l. 4), the afterlife of war seeps into daily life, witnessed in those ‘little Children’ who ‘stun’ their grandmothers with ‘pleasure’ of their ‘noise’ (ll. 8–9): a sequence of words that queasily conjoin violence and rapture, sickness and dispute. Only in the mind of God or, mundanely, through the reparative work of metre and rhyme can such sights and such sounds be made agreeable:

In what sense must ‘triumph’ be ‘Divine’ and how, precisely, is the appeal to religion linked with that ‘something’ in ‘the prospect of our Brethren slain’ that the ‘heart enjoys’? Like ‘something evermore about to be’, a calculated vagueness ensures that the horrifying likelihood of British losses is sublated, transformed by the assurance of eternal ‘glory’ into a sublime object of desire.

What does Wordsworth’s affirmation of the logic of sacrifice, evident in works published in the aftermath of Amiens, amount to if not a diminution of the ability of Fancy to arouse thoughts of an alternative to the life that exists only to be negated? Fancy has a significant part to play in my discussion of Wordsworth’s post-war verse, but its importance should not be over-emphasised. As evidenced by the gloomy necessitarianism of ‘The Small Celandine’, a poem appearing amid the daisy poems, flowers cannot be relied on to sustain ideas of blithe, pacific joy. ‘Stiff in its members, withered, changed of hue’ (l. 19), ‘an offering to the Blast’ (l. 11), the decayed flower elicits a chilling response, ‘I smiled that it was grey’ (l. 20), on a par with the sociopathic enjoyment in destruction evoked in ‘Anticipation’. If the poetry Wordsworth wrote and published in the aftermath of war demonstrates an unexpected yearning for the ‘surprising, playful, ludicrous, amusing, tender, or pathetic’, caring ‘not how unstable or transitory may be her influence’, it yet remains in the shadow of Imagination, which the poet maintains ‘is a word of higher import, denoting operations of the mind upon [absent external] objects, and processes of creation or composition, governed by certain fixed laws’ (Prose III. 31).

To track the emergence of a discourse of peace in Wordsworth’s poetry is therefore to commit to the pursuit of a phantom figure, unstable and transitory, but nonetheless detectable, and perhaps not least in those poems in which the note of unbridled militancy most stridently resounds. In the chapters that follow we will lose sight of this phantom, to the extent that doubts will set in as to whether it can return; moreover, as the argument proceeds, moving more or less chronologically from the beginnings of Wordsworth’s great engagement with the poetics of peace and war, ‘The Recluse’, before reaching a provisional terminus at the end of a thirty-year period of international and civil conflict with the Memorials of a Tour of the Continent, 1820, we will come to believe, at times, that peace has been exorcised from Wordsworth’s writing. What will sustain us, however, is the surety that it is the relationship between peace and war, rather than the opposition of peace and war, that animates this writing, complicating the appearance of a straightforward binary to reveal thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that migrate between these states.

Ad Utrumque Paratus

Writing to the liberal-minded Francis Wrangham, not long after the announcement of Napoleon’s first abdication in the spring of 1814, Wordsworth provocatively declared himself to be a member of the ‘War-faction’. Centring on a reading of ‘The Recluse’, the ‘long poem’ with which the poet hoped to advance his reputation (MY II. 144), Chapter 1 opens with a consideration of the representation of peace in ‘Home at Grasmere’ (1800–06), a poem later known as ‘Part first Book first’ of ‘The Recluse’.⁹⁹ Through close readings of the 1808 ‘Recluse’ fragments that Wordsworth went on to adapt for The Excursion, the chapter investigates how remnants of the poet’s early interest in radical, pacificist thought, described by Hazlitt as ‘traces, which are not to be effaced by Birth-day and Thanksgiving odes, or the chaunting of Te Deums in all the churches of Christendom’ (CWWH XIX. 18), speak against the poem’s declared allegiance with the values of Britain’s political and religious establishment. Noting how the poem’s composition is bisected by the composition of the pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra (1810), and the letter to the military theorist Sir Charles Pasley (1811), writings that explore the links between armed struggle, national independence, and the primacy of the Imagination, the chapter goes on to consider how The Excursion, through the character of the Solitary, grants expression to the revolutionary hope for perpetual peace, world citizenship, and delight in Fancy’s ‘mutable array’ (Book III. l. 740).¹⁰⁰ By revealing, in Spinoza’s sense, the relationship between hope and uncertainty (‘Hope is an inconstant joy, born of the idea of a future […] whose outcome we to some extent doubt’),¹⁰¹ I argue that the Solitary’s abandonment of hope paradoxically paves the way for its return, allowing for the possibility of forms of peaceful co-existence that, while they cannot be foreseen, may yet be conceived.

In Chapter 2 attention turns to The White Doe of Rylstone, a poem arising out of familial grief whose engagement with the melancholic afterlife of war was brought into sharp relief following its publication in the year of Waterloo. To contemporary readers, attracted by the ‘strong passion and violent excitement’ of Walter Scott’s epic-romances, The White Doe, with its air of ‘profound sadness, settled grief, the everlasting calm of melancholy, and the perfect stillness of resignation’, seemed out of step with the times.¹⁰² To some readers, however, the poem spoke all too well of the need for a ‘gentle’ and ‘subdued’ alternative to Scott’s militant poetics.¹⁰³ Framed by descriptions of loss and desolation, The White Doe casts the hegemonic ambitions of its protagonists as symptomatic of a degraded Imagination. Mistaking material ambition for spiritual salvation, the home of the Catholic Nortons falls into ruin; but ruin enables a different kind of imaginative flourishing, one that allows for the emergence of strange and unforeseen forms of being. Whether encountered in the love between the human and the non-human, in the slow effacement of Rylstone Hall, or in the merging of the sacred and the profane, The White Doe offered a way for post-war readers to imagine peace, not as the ‘bootless bene’ of history but as a form of aesthetic play that, even as it risks jettisoning actually existing peace to the realm of transcendental inaccessibility, discovers in the comingling of absence and presence, lack and plenitude, finitude and infinitude the preconditions for a life no longer marked by the struggle for self-definition.¹⁰⁴

Focussing on a reading of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, and its accompanying shorter poems, Chapter 3 sets Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo compositions within the context of broader, contemporary debates concerning the relations between war, religion, and sacrifice. Poised between gratitude for the decisive victory over France and frank acknowledgement of that victory’s human costs, Wordsworth’s nomination of ‘carnage’ as the ‘daughter’ of God (‘Thanksgiving Ode’, l. 282) proved a step too far for many of the poet’s younger supporters,¹⁰⁵ confirming, in Shelley’s words, that the herald of ‘Liberty,/Justice and philosophic truth’ had ‘Fallen on a cold and evil time’.¹⁰⁶ While elsewhere in the Thanksgiving volume attempts are made to cleanse the ‘stains’ of a ‘perturbèd earth’ (‘Elegiac Verses’, ll. 1–4),¹⁰⁷ the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ remains dogged in its attention to the recalcitrant remains of ‘victory sublime’,¹⁰⁸ an attention that, this chapter argues, should be read within the larger context of Wordsworth’s struggle to submit the militant striving of Imagination to the superintendent power of the divine. If in one sense, the ode displays vatic indifference to human suffering, figuring in the sacrifice of Imagination to History’s ‘closing deed magnificent’ (l. 167) a gesture akin to the numerous corporeal sacrifices enacted on the field of battle, in another sense the poem is informed by an acute awareness of how ideological abstractions are scored in human flesh. Taking as inspiration Spenser’s Epithalamion, a poem supposed to be sung before the door of a wedding chamber, the ode steers Wordsworth’s earlier, more celebrated experiment with the odal form in directions that are at once glaringly public and obscurely intimate. With memories too of how, in 1802, peace conflated the distinctions between union and disunion, legitimacy and illegitimacy in Wordsworth’s sexual relations, the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ tacitly acknowledges the recent wedding of the poet’s daughter, Caroline Wordsworth-Vallon. Figured as the bearer of conflict and as a principle of restitution, Caroline hovers on the margins of the ode, a symbol of peace founded in war. In other poems from this period, most notably in ‘Laodamia’ and ‘Dion’, the ability of marriage to heal the traumatic divisions and aberrant liaisons of war comes under increasing strain, to the point where, as the chapter concludes, peace becomes fugitive.

Following consideration of Wordsworth’s low reputational and creative stock in the years following the Thanksgiving volume, Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the composition, publishing, and reception histories of Peter Bell and The Waggoner, both of which appeared in 1819. Here, my focus turns to the abandoned narrative poems volume that would have paired these poems with The White Doe of Rylstone. To imagine this volume is to see again how elements of Wordsworth’s purportedly abandoned interest in the poetics of peace resurface in the later work, complicating our understanding of the poet’s cultural, artistic, and political development. In a reading of Peter Bell, the chapter reflects on the representation of violence and on the poem’s attempts to negotiate the terms of a peaceable relationship between the human and the non-human. In the discussion of The Waggoner, an account of the poem’s reception forms the basis for an examination of the poem’s meditation on creative failure, artistic isolation, and the potential for co-operative living in the aftermath of war. Picking up on the conative entanglement of human and non-human entities first addressed in Peter Bell, the chapter considers how Benjamin’s waggon works like a peaceable commonwealth to realise the potential of its component parts in ways that advance the well-being of the whole.¹⁰⁹ Sadly, this happy assemblage is short-lived, which leaves the poem’s depiction of a world committed to the accommodation of ontological diversity an elusive but resonant fancy.

The focus of Chapter 5 is on The River Duddon, published in April 1820, just prior to the Wordsworths’ visit to Manchester to inspect the site of the Peterloo Massacre. The poems Wordsworth composed in the years just prior to and immediately after Peterloo bear the imprint of the poet’s concern for the degraded state of Britain and are marked by his fear of social insurrection. Introduced by a reading of Wordsworth’s Autumn poems, ‘September, 1819’ and ‘Upon the Same Occasion’, the chapter proceeds to trace the recurrence of patterns of violent imagining in the Duddon sonnets, which discover, through their adaptation of the ostensibly pacific but deeply conflicted poetics of the sacred fount tradition, a fitting analogue for the times. Even though, on the surface, the Duddon sonnets proffer a vision of peace, predicted on the unity in diversity of its thirty-three component parts, closer inspection reveals a work silted by the material accretions of history. The chapter concludes with an account of how the material contradictions underpinning the fluvial tradition are displayed in the arrangement of the three-volume Poems (1820) and four-volume Miscellaneous Poems (1820) and in the sequencing of the Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822). If the river sequence offers the promise of recuperation, allowing the poet to perceive the accidents of history, whether personal or collective, as divinely ordered stages in a providentially directed narrative, the genre inevitably reveals its origins in bloodshed and ruin. Yet it is from such ruins, as Ecclesiastical Sketches go on to suggest, that forms of peaceable life may once again be salvaged. Frequently dismissed as the propagandist remainders of an ossified mind, Wordsworth’s account of the rise of the Anglican Church turns out to be surprisingly astute and even at times liberatory in its appreciation of the ordinary, profane life that may be found within ‘choirs unroofed by selfish rage’.¹¹⁰

Chapter 6 resumes discussion of Wordsworth’s experiments with the poetics of riparian nationalism. In Memorials of a Tour of the Continent, 1820, the poet follows the course of the Rhine and the Rhône, revisiting scenes that, thirty years earlier, had provided a setting for dreams of radical rebirth. After his visit to Peterloo, Wordsworth’s encounter with his own past had begun in Calais, meeting the grown-up daughter whose childhood was glimpsed briefly in 1802 and whose wedding was obliquely acknowledged in the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’. A visit to Waterloo yields chastened thoughts of ‘horror breathing from the silent ground’,¹¹¹ while elsewhere peace is recovered in fleeting impressions of sacerdotal calm. Here again, however, the appeal to life-restoring waters is jeopardised by the insistent return of war, by recollections of violent struggle in Europe’s long-distant and recent past. But Wordsworth’s battle with the past is intensified by another, more pressing, conflict: a spat with Lord Byron, who in Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had forged an impression of post-war Europe heavily indebted to Wordsworth. In Don Juan Byron made his distaste for Wordsworth very clear, singling out for disdain both Peter Bell and The Waggoner. Wordsworth took notice of this attack, and in many respects the Memorials can be read as an effort to defend a reputation that, in Wordsworth’s eyes, had been traduced by Byron, while attempting at the same time to correct the pro-Napoleonic sentiments that, on account of the popularity of Childe Harold, had been allowed to infect the public imagination, casting a pall on the legitimacy of the post-war settlement. The Memorials make clear that Wordsworth’s efforts to make peace with his own history, a history informed by the conflicted history of Europe, remained unresolved and that by returning to the restorative channels of youth the poet had, in fact, merely reinitiated the repetitive cycle in which peace is coupled with war.

The conclusion to this book offers a perspective on Wordsworth’s cultural afterlife, finding in the postscript to Leigh Hunt’s pacificist polemic, Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835; revised 1849), and Thomas De Quincey’s pro-Crimean essay, ‘On War’ (1848; revised 1854), the resources for a reading of the politics and poetics of late Romanticism that responds to the contradiction in Wordsworth’s poetry revealed in these polarised works: the clash between the hope for perpetual peace and the grim satisfaction of eternal war. Whereas De Quincey, citing the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, remains obdurate in his support for the ‘dreadful doctrine’ that war is ‘amongst the evils that are salutary to man’,¹¹² Hunt joins with those later generations of readers who, experiencing war at first hand, found solace in poems celebrating the life of rivers, mountains, and flowers. Though Wordsworth’s poems do not flinch from violent imaginings, for such readers it yet remains possible that peace will come.