ABSTRACT
For William Wordsworth, the question of ageing is bound up with anxieties about mortality, living on, and youthful fears of failure to attain longevity, as well as worries about what will remain of life if old age is reached. The larger questions and anxieties about ageing form the remit of Wordsworth’s imaginative, often ghostly, encounters with and depiction of the elderly. The nuances and tensions indicate how Wordsworth’s representation of, and engagement with, the question of ageing complicate in more disturbing ways his imaginative impulse towards a poetic vision of collective compensation. Through Wordsworth’s intended imaginative transformation of the elderly into symbols of consolation, the Spectral figures risk losing their common touch, sense of human relation, and sympathetic understanding for which Wordsworth, initially, valorised them. Through Michael’s regular visits to the site Wordsworth gestures towards the possibility of ‘comfort’, consolation, and the making of the unbearable ‘thing endurable’.
