Intimations of Immortality

Abstract

Hardy probably became first acquainted with Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ in the copy of The Golden Treasury which Horace Moule gave him in January 1862. It was a volume he prized all his life, and he knew most of its poems intimately. Concealed or disclosed quotations from ‘Intimations’ occur in at least six of his novels. In A Pair of Blue Eyes he twice uses ‘the glory and the dream’ with reference to Knight’s love of Elfride. Wordsworth’s romantic view of childhood is the target of an accusatory Positivist when, on their last night in the old home at Marlott, the youngest of the Durbeyfield family are presented singing a hymn to Tess (li):

If she could only believe what the children were singing; if she were only sure, how different all would now be; how confidently she would leave them to Providence and their future kingdom! But, in default of that, it behoved her to do something; to be their Providence; for to Tess, as to not a few millions of others, there was ghastly satire in the poet’s lines –

Not in utter nakedness

But trailing clouds of glory do we come.

To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at best could only palliate.