My main question is: what is meant by the theme of impending apocalypse? How does this lingering anxiety tie into the dichotomy of Nature and Imagination? The Poet’s Revelationīefore we examine these questions, it is necessary to understand how Wordsworth reconciles the disparate aspects of Nature and Imagination. Finally, once Wordsworth descends from the top of Mont Blanc, he witnesses the “Characters of the great Apocalypse.” The poet dreams of a coming wave that would “bring destruction to the children of the Earth”. In book V, Wordsworth curiously pivots to the discussion of “fire come down from far to scorch / Her pleasant habitations”. “when the light of sense / Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed / The invisible world, doth greatness make abode (1850, VI, 597)“Īfter all this, a lingering point deserves attention. Through a visionary revelation at the top of Mount Blanc, Wordsworth discovers the creative agency and unbounded power of Imagination: Wordsworth looks back through his childhood and education to reconcile these disparate aspects of Nature and Imagination. It is tempting to read the poem as a kind of nature worship, however that theory is complicated by the anxiety that Wordsworth describes as he fails to capture the immediacy of Nature within the act of poetry (Hartman, 598). On the surface, Wordsworth’s fourteen-book poetic autobiography was intended to find inspiration to write the joint The Recluse with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Abrams, 587). Revelations and the Horizon of Sense Experience
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