Poem as Solitude?

At the end of Book I, the speaker seems to reveal the reason he’s writing his poem—to “fix the wavering balance of my mind” (I, 650) from his recollections—to “be taught/To understand myself” as he is (I, 654-5). He wishes to trace himself back through his childhood so that he can more clearly understand why he is the person that he is now, and then to take that a step further and actually improve himself—for future “honorable toil” (653). Of course, he only introduces this idea while also implying that he recognizes that he may not be doing it at all. Even so, he will be “loth to quit/Those recollected hours” (658-9), and he here reveals what is perhaps a more true reason for his recollections—for nostalgia, recollection for recollection’s sake. The “one end” that has been achieved, he notes, is “My mind hath been revived” (664).

Thus the memories become, essentially, a kind of solitude for the speaker. Wordsworth’s speaker is again infatuated with “the self-sufficing power of solitude” (II, 78). In Book II, solitude becomes oddly “more active than ‘best society’” (314).  And memory itself is a rather solitary pursuit—no one has the exact same memories, after all, even if they were physically together when they were making them. The speaker’s joy at the end of Book I as he defends his recollections revival of his mind is akin to the revival he feels in the solitude of nature, the space within himself becoming a kind of internal nature. The speaker does note another kind of appreciation within himself separate from the “extrinsic passion” (I, 572) of Nature—those “Of subtle origin” (576) that he considers innate.

The poem itself becomes a kind of refuge, a solidified and realized place for the solitude of his memories to coalesce. His worry that he may be putting adult sensibilities onto his childhood memories—tainting them, in essence—demonstrates his desire to almost disappear completely into memory, into the self that was closer to nature. His yearning for this solitude becomes a double solitude, then—in his memory he has been secluded in the natural world, and now, as he is remembering, he is secluded in his memory. No one else can experience his memory, after all.

This is, of course, complicated by the address to the reader/Coleridge, who the speaker notes has also “sought/the truth in solitude” (II, 475-6). As a reference to Coleridge, this perhaps is a more personal address. However, the “you” of the poem also naturally becomes the reader, and thus the speaker could be referring to the solitude the reader is seeking by reading the poem, the speaker’s own solitude. At the same time, can the speaker’s address to “you” be counted as genuine human interaction? There is no response, after all—no way for there to be a response, really. In a sense, his addresses to the reader/Coleridge increases the sense of his solitude. The speaker does create another character in his addressee, but is often obsessed with assuring “you” that you won’t mind listening to his poem, that you will understand. He crafts the “you” character around a possible response to his poem without actually engaging anyone else.  Still, the speaker has said that the point is not only for him to understand himself, but also to give the reader/Coledridge “better knowledge how the heart was framed/Of him thou lovest” (656-7). In this sense, then, his writing of the poem—which fossilizes his solitude—is also a way for him to share his solitude with someone else—for him to break out of solitude.