The Grief Behind the Spots of Time

It has gone virtually unrecognized that the major trauma in Wordsworth's early life was a double one, the untimely loss of his parents. First his mother died when he was almost eight and then his father died when he was thirteen. The death of his mother marks his division of experience into the bliss of childhood and the alienation that comes with advancing years. He articulates this division in “Intimations of Immortality,” but it underlies much of his poetry. He transferred some of his deepest feelings for his mother to nature in response to her death. The death of his father five years later completed and intensified the earlier trauma of losing his mother. The loss of his father gave poignancy to the encounters with wandering old men and with other displaced persons that a number of his poems present. To take this double loss and his response to it as a central and formative aspect of the poet's early experience is to shift to a different focus for interpreting Wordsworth's vision than that of a number of Freudian readings of Wordsworth.

The growing literature on early parental loss emphasizes the intensity and pervasiveness of this kind of trauma for the developing psyche of the child. John Bowlby's studies show how the disruption of primary parent-child bonds through the death of a parent does irreparable harm when it occurs early in a child's life. Bowlby has articulated a syndrome of pathological mourning which is particularly prevalent among bereaved children. This syndrome is a defensive process which runs counter to the normal mourning process. Normal mourning consists of a gradual letting go of the lost person through periodic eruptions of intense grief. Pathological mourning, by contrast, consists of the child's continuing unconscious fixation on his ties to the dead parent: