WORDSWORTH AND INFANCY ALEXANDER FREER ALEXANDER FREER Wordsworth and the Infancy of Affection All the new thinking is about loss. —Robert Hass 1 1 W ordsworth’s “ode: intimations of immortality from recollec- tions of Early Childhood” contrasts its speaker’s current existence with the recollections of infancy which he is neither able to fully recall, nor completely evade. The poem insists on the minimal continuity between infant sensation and adult experience. Infant experience is shown to be both an impossible topic and the only possible topic for a poem about ori- gins: impossible because the representation of infant experience is under- mined even at the level of the sentence; necessary because this experience is nonetheless the only source of insight we have into the nature of the soul. In opposition to critics who either seek to elevate adulthood over in- fancy and read the poem as a consolation of philosophy, or elevate infancy over adulthood and read the poem as nostalgic elegy, I will follow Stuart Sperry and Kenneth Johnston in acknowledging Wordsworth’s productive ambivalence between the two states. The “Ode,” as Johnston notes, suc- ceeds in “deriving gain from the felt reality of loss,” but it does not suppose a calculation of overall proªt or loss. 2 My aim is to substantiate an “ambiva- lent” interpretation of the poem through a broadly psychoanalytic reading of the “Ode” and its consideration of infant and adult experience. Using and extending Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s Lyric Poetry , I will suggest how the poem might both acknowledge an irreversible loss and maintain what Sperry calls “an almost physical sense of continuity through time.” 3 Conti- 1. Hass, Praise (New York: Echo Press, 1979), 4. 2. Johnston, “Recollecting Forgetting: Forcing Paradox to the Limit in the ‘Intimations Ode,’” The Wordsworth Circle 2, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 64. 3. Sperry, “From ‘Tintern Abbey’ to the ‘Intimations Ode’: Wordsworth and the Func- tion of Memory,” The Wordsworth Circle 1, no. 2 (Spring 1970): 41. SiR, 54 (Spring 2015) 79