Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

172William Wordsworththe landscape. His appeal, in other words, combines the experientialtestimony of both the past and the present. His second-person addressto the Wye as “thou wanderer thro’ the woods” evokes yet anotherimage of immanence—but an image that draws the poet’s eye backinto the specific scene and recalls him from the wavering expressedin his suddenly intruding hypothesis. This return to the concrete asan anodyne for doubt is an action that the poet later formulates as afundamental requirement of his consciousness: Wordsworth writes inlines 107 through 109 that he is “well pleased to recognize / In natureand the language of the sense / The anchor” of his “purest thoughts.”An anchor, of course, achieves a purchase upon stability by sinking intothe depths of the sea; and here Wordsworth stabilizes himself, escapesfrom the wavering hypothesizing of one of his “purest thoughts,” byaddressing his awareness to an immediately given image of an actionproceeding through an interior. 20 Vision is to be preserved by an adhesionto sensation, and his eye returns to an image of the immanenceof the woods.At the end of the third verse paragraph, Wordsworth has thuscompleted an almost circular movement of his consciousness: frompresent to past back to present; from landscape to a history of therelationships of his mind to that landscape back to landscape; fromoutward awareness to inward awareness back to outward awareness.This circular movement might almost be compared to an explorationof Chinese boxes: Wordsworth “opens” the strangely immanentlandscape and discovers himself in the “box” of a room in the city.He recalls, almost seems to reexperience, the exploration by his pastmind (trapped within that city box) into the remembered “beauteousforms.” Immanence leads to deeper immanence. At the moment ofdeepest penetration, there occurs a vision “into” something he terms“the life of things.” And immediately, at this moment of climax,the lid of this ultimate interior slams shut, and Wordsworth is leftwondering whether he is guilty of a “vain belief.” His anxiety isdispelled, or at least he attempts to dispel it, by a return through hismemories to the surface of the landscape. This action of consciousnessis similar in part to that poignant moment of introspection inBook XII of The Prelude where Wordsworth also uses the languageof immanence to delineate an intense moment of perplexingintrospection: