Wordsworth: ‘The still, sad music of humanity’

Wordsworth offers both a general and a more personal experience of tragedy, though the two are closely linked, since it is the collective sense of individual privations and misfortunes which gives rise to the general awareness of tragedy. They merge together in a pervasive sense of the insecurity of human life, which in ‘Tintern Abbey’ he calls ‘The still, sad music of humanity’. Individual happiness can be intense and pure, and as such it is to be rejoiced in; and Wordsworth celebrates it in verse which, at times, seems almost naively selective. But this is only a way of reaffirming that spontaneous pleasure, especially in childhood, is a necessity of life. It is on a par with the sense he enjoyed when he himself was a child that death could not touch him personally, recorded in a note on the Immortality Ode:

Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being.… But it was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came as from a sense of indomitableness of the spirit within me.¹