ABSTRACT
Mrs. Clarkson writes about the Ode, Wordsworth remarked after the sentence already quoted: A Reader who has not a vivid recollection of these feelings having existed in his mind cannot understand the poem. Dover Wilson could certainly find, outside the Ode lines in which the word common has the kind of force he indicates. The nostalgia the backward looks at the sea from the continent of human life, does little to prepare us for lines 1845. We grieves not which might well come upon the reader with some effect of abruptness. The philosophic mind is also the idealizing mind, and looks through death, perhaps, because it refuses to accept as final the given, material world. It is only by means of these ambiguities that Wordsworth has reconciled in some measure the warring contradictions in the poem. The fact that the serenity of the final lines is not so much achieved by the poem as ingeniously added.
