Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

176William Wordsworthmost obvious example of this language is of course the poem’s onlyother “something,” that which is “far more deeply interfused”). Thisperplexity, I have been arguing, relates to Wordsworth’s reflexiveconsciousness of the activity of his own mind; a consciousness thatin Book XIII of the 1805 Prelude is the “highest bliss” of those poeticminds whoseconsciousnessOf whom they are [is] habitually infusedThrough every image, and through every thought,And all impressions. 23The precise source of Wordsworth’s perplexity in “Tintern Abbey”is the fact that, though the meditation explores how his mind isimmanent in nature, infused through “every image” and “all impressions,”he never can quite bring himself to recognize this infusion. Tobe sure, the landscape makes him think a great deal about his mind,its transactions with itself and with nature in the past, the present,and the future. But during this “thinking about,” which constitutesthe action of the meditation, Wordsworth does not seem explicitly torecognize that the special resonance of his perceptions, both in thepresent and in the chambers of memory, derives from the fact thatfrequently these acts of perception are simultaneously acts of apperception;that frequently the intended objects of his consciousnesstend to become indistinguishable from the intentionality, the directionof consciousness, which grasps them. Apperception, the reflexivesense of the mind’s activity, is lodged in perception, and thus naturebecomes immanent.Now, as we also have seen, Wordsworth is afraid of staring toodirectly at his mind—afraid of too unmediated an act of apperception.His mind is a “haunt,” a sacred region filled with a numinouspresence, and thus it fills him with awe and dread. But this mind thatis experienced as a “haunt,” as the place of the “Holy,” is not the mindhe thinks about, the mind he constitutes as the direct object of hismeditation; it is rather the immediately “living” mind he encountersmore or less obliquely in the act of apperception. While the Wordsworthof 1805 may have decided this structure of consciousness was“highest bliss,” the Wordsworth of 1793 was flying from “something”that he dreaded—in much the same way a soul of an earlier