24
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Strength beyond hope or despair / Climbing the third stair" there
is no account, in other terms than those of poetry, to be given of
how it comes.
I found Richards's reference to "Constancy to an Ideal Object" helpful,
not because it named a theme the poem shares with "Ash-Wednes–
day"-Hope and Despair meeting in the porch of Death-but because
Coleridge equivocates between saying that the ideal object is identical
with the beloved woman and that it is not.
In
the end, trying to answer
the question-is the Ideal Object nothing?-he shifts the terms alto–
gether to an objective correlative:
And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!
Coleridge says much the same as Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey"–
"both what we half-create and what perceive"-but he looks on the
gloomy side of it.
In
"Dejection" he allows for the brighter side-"O
lady we receive but what we give." The speaker in "Ash-Wednesday" is
not an enamoured rustic, but he rejoices, "having to construct some–
thing / Upon which to rejoice." He knows he has to make the shadow
he pursues.
Leavis thought well of "Ash-Wednesday" for different reasons than
Richards. The poet was preoccupied, he said, with the problem of sin–
cerity:
He had
to
achieve a paradoxical precision-in-vagueness; to per–
suade the elusive intuition to define itself, without any forcing,
among the equivocations of "the dreamcrossed twil ight." The
warning against crude interpretation, against trying
to
elicit any–
thing in the nature of prose statement, is there in the unexpected
absences of punctuation; and in the repetitive effects, which suggest
a kind of delicate tentativeness. The poetry itself is an effort at
resolving diverse impulsions, recognitions, and needs.
