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Wordsworth's Hope

Adam Potkay

The Wordsworth Circle, 2019

Wordsworth engages with the Christian wisdom of his day, wherein worldly wishes—for glory or wealth, permanence or improvement, adequate sensory pleasure—give way to super-sensual hope in eternity and infinity. What abides on earth is the cardinal virtue related to hope, magnanimity, the greatness of soul that aspires to great things, as well as the countervailing virtue of humility. While admiring the patriotic magnanimity and modesty of his French acquaintance Michel Beaupuy, Wordsworth also claims that our destiny lies with things unseen and—less conventionally—with an indeterminate, ever-receding future. “Our destiny, our nature, and our home, / Is with infinitude—and only there; / With hope it is, hope that can never die, / Effort, and expectation, and desire, / And something evermore about to be” (6:538-42). Still, tangible things seen, and recalled, can also be our home if we live alongside them with humility and self-distance, welcoming what is given and craving no more. Wordsworth’s near-quietism rises to drama in his verse by its aspirational quality, just as his deathless hope, or hope in deathlessness, finds no secure basis in faith and doctrine until late in the p

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