ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a poem has in its entirety an essential value greater than that of its most clearly inspired passages with reference to the Ode to a Nightingale and Resolution and Independence. Wordsworth's poem about the leech-gatherer is on another footing, and throws the question into sharp relief. It is impossible to make a prose transcript of the Nightingale ode without losing the essential significance of the poem entirely. That resides in the poetic revelation that is sustained phrase by phrase from the first line to the last. Of Wordsworth's poem, on the other hand, a brief transcript might be made that would not wholly do violence to the content matter of the original. In reading Wordsworth's poem, people feel the apocalyptic touch often, but not steadily throughout the narrative. The moral implications from which the material of the poem is gathered are pleasing to reflection, but they do not liberate the shaping powers of the imagination.
