The secondary Wordsworth's first of homes

home at Grasmere

pp. 33-47

in: Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

From 1798 onward, Wordsworth's principal endeavor was to become the poet of The Recluse, or to move beyond an imagination relevant only to a personal case history to demonstrate the imagination's workings in human life more generally.¹ For Wordsworth this was less a matter of moving from inner vision to culturally explicit prescription, than of reconciling the power of imagination with what was for him its own self-evident universality. In a verse fragment found in the Christabel Notebook (1798–9), Wordsworth's recollection seems to admit a reclusive aspect, in which the poet's "godlike faculties' are at the same time "the mind / And the mind's minister." These faculties, once made a free gift to nature, involve a recollective trance: "Nor in those hours / Did we destroy […] / The original impression of delight," Wordsworth writes, since "by such retrospect it [the trance] was recalled / To yet a second and a second life."² If this resonates with the 'spots of time" and the practice of transvaluing memories through a secondary, revisionary consciousness, here we encounter a surplus of second lives that do not just accrete remembrances but also juxtapose one form of the secondary against another. A 'second life" might not be identical to the earlier recalling (already secondary), but undergo a divergent seriality eliciting subsidiary ministering functions from an already compound imagination. The imagination's second life, as distinct from the secondariness which supervises its own gradualist formation, is the typically reclusive concern with the locus of imagination.